A Bridge of Years

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Some clue here, he thought.

  The canisters were about a hand high; and one of them had a wire handle attached to it at the rim.

  He stood above them and shone the flashlight down.

  The label on the can on the left said varsol.

  The label on the can on the right said evertint paint. In smaller print, Eggshell Blue.

  Tom turned and was startled by a string dangling in front of his face. He tugged it, and above his head a naked forty-watt bulb flared on.

  Ahead of him—up the stairs—he heard a whisper of traffic and rain.

  This was so disorienting—so disenchanting-—that he stood motionless for a long while in the glare of the overhead light. If anyone had seen him they might have said he was stunned. He looked like a man who had taken a powerful blow to the skull—still standing, but barely.

  Let's see, he thought, I headed south from the basement and then circled back, walked half an hour or so . . . maybe as far as the mall or the shops down by the highway. He climbed the stairs expecting nothing, passed another door into a seedy lobby he didn't recognize; then a thought struck him:

  It wasn't raining when I left the house.

  Well, that was a good long time ago now, wasn't it? Plenty of time for some weather to roll in from the sea.

  But he recalled the weekend weather forecast: sunshine all the way to Tuesday.

  Wouldn't be the first time they'd made a bad call; coastal weather could be unpredictable.

  Still, it was coming down pretty hard out there.

  Tom had emerged into what seemed to be the lobby of an apartment building: peeling linoleum, a row of buzzers, an inner and outer door—the outer door cracked in a starry pattern. He fixed the lobby in his mind as a landmark, then stepped outside.

  Into the rain.

  Into another world.

  Tom's first groping thought was that he had walked into a movie set—this was the most coherent explanation his fumbling mind could produce. Professional set dressing: a period piece.

  All the cars in the street were antiques, though some appeared virtually new. Must have cost a fortune, he thought dazedly, assembling all this collectible transportation and parking it in a part of town that wasn't familiar (that isn't Belltower, one agitated fraction of self insisted), where all the buildings were period buildings and where the people were period people, or actors, or extras, dozens of them, scurrying through the rain. And no cameras. And no lights.

  He cowered back into the rain shadow of this grubby building.

  It was very difficult to think. A part of him was giddy, elated. He had arrived at this unimaginable destination by unimaginable means, he had fucking done it. Magic! Elation meanwhile doing battle with its partner, stark animal fear of the unknown. One step in the wrong direction and he would be lost, as lost as it was possible to be. All he really knew was that he had arrived somewhere where the shiniest vehicle on the street was what appeared to be a '61 Buick—or something like it—and all the men braving the rain this cold evening were wearing for Christ's sake hats, not rain hats but dress hats—trilbies or fedoras or whatever they were called —the kind of hats you saw in old Cary Grant comedies. Planet of the Hats!

  It was very, very strange but also very, very real. A cold wind gusted rain into his face. Real rain. A woman bent under her umbrella shot him a sidelong glance as she passed, and Tom understood that she was at home here, he was the intruder—a strange, distraught, disheveled man wearing a packsack. He glanced down at himself. His jeans were gray with dust, streaked where the rain had penetrated the dirt. His hands were almost completely black.

  The thought persisted: I'm the stranger here.

  And, on some even deeper level, he knew exactly what this place was. He had traveled a mile or so down a featureless tunnel (machine, the television had called it)—and maybe thirty-odd years into the past.

  Not the past of Belltower, Washington. It was a dark night, but he knew at once this was a bigger and busier city than Belltower had ever been. But an American city. The cars were American. The people looked American. An American city ... in or around the year of his birth.

  He didn't accept this explanation, not entirely. Logic objected. Sanity was outraged. But logic and sanity had been forced into the back seat quite a while ago, hadn't they? He wouldn't have been too surprised if the tunnel had opened onto the surface of Mars. Was a thirty-year-old rainstorm really such a surprise?

  Well, yes. It was. A surprise and a shock. But he was beginning to get a handle on it.

  He thought, / can't stay here. In fact, the feeling was more urgent. You're a long way from home and it's a long, dark crawl back to the tunnel. What if somebody seals up one of those doors? What if the Machine doesn't work anymore? What if— and here was a truly chilling thought—what if it's a one-way Machine?

  Anxiety veered toward panic.

  Lots here to figure out, Tom thought, lots of possibilities, lots to absorb, but the wise thing would be to turn back and contemplate his options.

  Before he did that, however, he took three long steps out into the frigid rain—past a miserable man with umbrella, unlit pipe, dog on a leash—to a newspaper box occupying curb space next to the shiny-wet Buick. He put three dimes into the paper box and pulled out the New York Times. Paused to inspect the date. May 13, 1962.

  Raindrops spattered across the front page.

  "It's a fucking miracle," he said out loud. "You were right all along, Doug. Miracles up along the Post Road."

  He turned and saw the dog-walker regarding him a little suspiciously, a little fearfully, while the dog, a springer spaniel, left its scent on a gray lamp standard. Tom smiled. "Nice weather!"

  "For lunatics," the man offered.

  Tom retreated past him into the sad lobby of this old building, its smell of mildew and ancient plaster and the unimaginable secret in its foundation. Still my secret, he thought. He turned away from the man on the street, away from the rain and the traffic, clutching his souvenir newspaper in one hand, down and away and home; or, if not home, at least back.

  Back, as they say, to the future.

  One more thing caught his attention before he began the long, fatiguing hike back to the basement. As he clambered over the stacked rubble into the tunnel, his flashlight reflected from an object half buried under the masonry and turned up, no doubt, by his movement: a machine bug.

  It was inert. He picked it up. The device had lost its shine; it wasn't just dusty, but dull, somehow empty.

  Dead, he thought. What it is, is dead.

  So the machine bugs must have been here, too, in the building behind him, cleaning and maintaining it . . . but something had killed them. At least, something had killed this one. And the wall had never been repaired, unlike the wall in Tom's basement.

  He put the broken creature in his pocket—in a strange way, the gesture was respectful—and took a deep breath, bracing himself for the long walk back.

  Home, he slept for twelve hours straight. He woke up to a sunny afternoon. He had missed a day at the lot; Klein would be, in Tony's immortal phrase, shitting bricks—but he dismissed the thought as soon as it came to him; he had other things to think about. He fixed himself a huge meal, bacon and fried eggs and buttered toast and a fresh pot of coffee. And sat down at the kitchen table, where the New York Times waited for him.

  He read it meticulously. He read the headline story: Laos had declared a state of emergency and eighteen hundred marines were en route to Indochina. Troops of the South Vietnamese Seventy-fifth Infantry had ambushed some guerrillas in Kien Phong Province, and President Kennedy had addressed a Democratic Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Milwaukee, mainly about the economy. The Mets had won both games of a doubleheader, defeating the Braves at the Polo Grounds. The weather? Cloudy, cool, occasional rain.

  He read the fashion ads, the movie ads, the sports pages. Then he folded the paper and set it neatly aside.

  He took a pad of paper and a pencil from a kitchen
drawer and opened the pad to its first fresh page.

  At the top he wrote, Troubling Questions. He underlined it twice.

  He paused, sipped coffee, then picked up the pencil.

  Something is wrong here, he wrote.

  Something is wrong or I would never have found the tunnel. The previous owner vanished. The machine bugs talked about "repairing" him/it. The machine bugs are running on autopilot, I think. The lights left on but the premises empty.

  Question of rubble at the end of the tunnel. "Destruction." But why, and committed by whom or what?

  Well, that was the real question, wasn't it?

  He wrote, The tunnel is an artifact. The tunnel is a time machine. It was built by someone. Someone owns it.

  Which would imply someone from the future, since they weren't assembling time tunnels down at General Dynamics these days. It was hard to come to grips with that idea, in part because of the echo of too much juvenile fantasy, too many comic books and bad movies. People from the future, very familiar: bald guys in pastel tights.

  The trouble was that such thinking was dangerously useless. He would have to think about these numbingly strange events with as much sobriety and clarity as he could muster. The stakes—he remembered destruction—might be very high.

  Some destructive force caused problems at this end of the tunnel, he wrote, bad enough that the owners bugged out and left the property running on automatic. The same force, presumably, did an even better job at the Manhattan end.

  But there was so much he still didn't know. Why a tunnel between Belltower and New York City? Were there more tunnels to other places? Did the tunnels always go to the same place? When they functioned normally, what were they for? Who used them?

  He wrote these questions down.

  Then paused, refilled his coffee cup and sat down again. He reached into his pocket and took out the dead machine bug.

  It lay pallid and empty-seeming on the inky front page of the Times.

  Death by misadventure. Most likely, he thought, it had been murdered.

  Ten years have passed, he wrote. If the passing of time means anything at all, under the circumstances.

  Chewed his pencil.

  You could walk away from this.

  After all: what was he really doing here? Tempting himself? Daring himself?

  This is dangerous, and you could walk away. It was undeniable.

  Maybe the only question is which way to walk.

  Because he had a choice now, didn't he? He felt a tingle of excitement, the pleasure of this secret option, this new ace that had been dealt him. He hadn't dared to consider it. He considered it now.

  You could leave it all behind.

  You could leave the car lot and the divorce and the polite pink slip and the greenhouse effect all behind. The sensation of writing the words made him dizzy. You could walk out on it. Everybody else on the face of the earth is being dragged into the future an hour at a time but you can walk out. You found the back door. Forcing some rationality here: Not the door to paradise. Thirty years ago. They have the Bomb. Think about it. They have industrial pollution. They have racism, ignorance, crime, starvation—

  They have the Bomb, he thought, but maybe the important thing was, they didn't use it He could live three decades, if he wanted to, knowing for a stone fact that the air-raid siren wouldn't go off. He could laugh at the newspapers. If he was diligent, if he did his homework, he'd know the plane he stepped onto wasn't going to fall out of the sky; he'd be out of town when the earthquake hit . . .

  And even if someone died, it would be a death already entered into the history books. No graves would be filled that weren't already full. The tragedy of the world would march on, but at least he would have its measure.

  He heard an echo of Barbara from that chamber in his head where memories lived and sometimes spoke: Are you really so frightened of the future?

  After Chernobyl, after Tiananmen Square, after his divorce? In a world where tritium regularly disappeared from scheduled shipments, where the national debt was coming due, where the stock market resembled an Olympic high-dive competition? Scared of the future, here in the world of teen suicide and the cost-effective assault rifle? Scared?—while the Brazilian rain forests clouded the atmosphere with their burning and the skin cancer rate had become an artifact of the evening news? What, frightened? Who, me?

  I'll go back one more time, he wrote. At least to look. To be there. At least once. Any other questions?

  Yes, he thought. Many. But he chose not to write them down.

  When Tom glanced up from the paper he saw that several of the larger machine bugs had climbed the table leg and were carrying their dead compatriot away.

  Maybe to replace it, Tom thought. Maybe to repair it: they were big on repairing things. Or maybe to bury it, to inter it in some metallic grave while they gathered around and sang electromagnetic hymns.

  They made a bright, glassy line against the kitchen tiles as they marched away. He didn't interfere.

  One more time, he promised himself, at least to see—all decisions postponed until then. He decided he'd provision himself for a weekend trip and in the meantime lead a normal life, as impossible as that sounded.

  Astonishingly, the charade was a success. He put in good hours at work. Tony invited him for a family dinner and that worked out well, too, with Tony and Loreen making casual but pointed inquiries about his health and his "attitude," Tom fending them off with carefully fuzzy answers. Time passed easily except at night, when his doubts came sneaking back like guilty prodigals. He installed a hardware store deadbolt on the door leading into the back basement—not that this would stop any serious traffic coming up the tunnel, but it was a useful psychological prop, a sleeping aid, like the small white pills he bought at the Valu-Save Pharmacy. He found some popular histories of the 1960s in the library and invested some study in the first third of that decade, everything up to the Kennedy assassination. It struck him as an oddly quiescent time, large events jostling in the wings but not quite ready to put in an appearance on stage. Call it a nervous appendage of the fifties. He began to recognize names: Gagarin, Khrushchev, John Glenn, Billie Sol Estes— but history paled in the face of this enormity, his secret shortcut through the maze of years and death. The week wheeled on.

  He woke up before dawn Saturday morning, marked the space between the wall studs and carved an opening with a keyhole saw—he was getting good at this.

  At the opposite end of the tunnel he noted with relief that the rubble had not been disturbed—only his own footprints in the dust—and that the broken lock on the adjoining door had not been replaced.

  No one knows yet.

  He was safe here still.

  He left the tunnel and ventured into the street on a cool and cloudy spring morning. Time passed at the same rate, he noted, here and at home, though the seasons were out of synchronization by a couple of months. He wrote down the street number of the tenement building he emerged from and then the street as he passed the sign at an intersection. Then simply walked. He was a tourist. That was what he'd say if anyone asked. I'm from out of town. Basic and quite true.

  Of course, he got lost.

  He had been to New York on business trips for Aerotech but his grasp of the city's geography was vague at best. He walked across Fourteenth Street to Fifth Avenue with the notion that he might find some familiar landmarks . . . but he didn't want to stray that far from the tunnel.

  Not that he would have a hard time finding his way back; the address was there in his pocket. But he couldn't hail a cab and he couldn't even buy a tourist map in a dimestore; his money was useless—or at least ran the risk of being mistaken for counterfeit—unless he put it in a vending machine. He told himself that getting lost wasn't such a bad thing; that he had planned to spend the day wandering—aimlessly or otherwise.

  But it was hard to navigate coherently. He walked in a daze, blinded by the miraculous. The most prosaic object—a woman's hat in a mil
liner's window, a billboard, a chromium hood ornament—would suddenly capture all his attention. They were tokens of the commutation of time, bodies risen from the grave. He could not say which was stranger, his own numbing awareness of the transiency of these things or the nonchalance of the people he passed—people for whom this was merely the present, solid as houses.

  It made him grin. It made him shiver.

  Of the people he passed, many must have died by 1989. These are the lives of the dead, Tom thought. These are their ghost-lives, and I've entered into them. If they'd known, they might have looked at him twice. He was a cold wind from the land of their children . . . one more cold wind on a cold afternoon.

  It was afternoon now, and colder than it had been, and the rain started again; a bitter, squalling rain that ran down his collar and seemed to pool, somehow, at the base of his spine. From Fifth Avenue he crossed Washington Square North into the park. He recognized the arch from one of his visits to the city, but that arch had been a canvas for spray-paint graffiti; this arch was visibly marble, if not pristine. He found a bench (the rain had subsided a little) and occupied it while he calculated his route home; then a young woman in harlequin-rimmed glasses and a black sweater stopped and looked at him—really looked—and asked him his name, and wondered whether he had anywhere to go.

  Her name was Joyce Casella. She bought him coffee.

  She took him home.

  He woke once in the night. Waking, he unfolded his memory of the day and examined it—read it like a text, for clues. The mystery was what he ought to do next. He had come a great distance without a compass.

  A siren wailed in the outer darkness. He stood up, here in this shabby room in the city of New York in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-two, stumbled through a dim wash of streetlight to the bathroom and pissed into the rusty porcelain bowl. He was embedded in a miracle, he thought, not just the miracle of 1962 but the miracle of its dailiness, of this toothpaste-stained 1962 medicine cabinet, this 1962 bottle of aspirin, this leaky 1962 faucet ...