A Bridge of Years
Page 23
"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 any-
i y>
more.
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 t
o the chair.
She began without much confidence, letting the guitar carry her—more certain of her fingers than of her voice. Tom sat among the quieting crowd while she ran a few arpeggios and chord changes, pausing once to tune a string. He closed his eyes and appreciated the rich body of the Hohner.
"This is an old song," she said.
She sang "Fannerio," and Tom felt the piercing dissonance of time and time: here was this long-haired woman in a Village cafe playing folk ballads, an image he associated with faded Technicolor movies, record jackets abandoned at garage sales, moldering back issues of Life. It was a cliche and it was painfully naive. It was quaint.
But this was Joyce, and she loved these words and these tunes.
She sang "The Bells of Rhymney" and "Lonesome Traveler" and "Nine Hundred Miles." Her voice was direct, focused, and sometimes inconsolably sad.
Maybe Larry was right, Tom thought. We love them for their goodness, and then we scour it out of them.
What had he given her, after all?
A future she didn't want. A night of stark terror in a hole under Manhattan. A burden of unanswerable questions. He had come into her life like a shadow, the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, with his bony ringer pointed at a grave.
He wanted her optimism and her intensity and her fierce caring, because he didn't have any of his own . . . because he had mislaid those things in his own inaccessible past.
She sang "Maid of Constant Sorrow" under a blue spot, alone on the tiny stage.
Tom thought about Barbara.
The applause was generous, a hat was passed, she waved and stepped back into the shadows. Tom circled around behind the stage, where she was latching the Hohner into its shell. Her face was somber.
She looked up. "The manager says Lawrence called."
"Called here?"
"Said he'd been trying to get hold of us all day. He wants us to go over to his apartment and it's supposed to be urgent."
What could be urgent? "Maybe he's drunk." "Maybe. But it's not like him to phone here. I think we should go."
They walked from the cafe, Joyce hurrying ahead, obviously concerned. Tom was more puzzled than worried, but he let her set the pace.
They didn't waste any time. They arrived too late, anyhow.
There was a crowd in the stairwell, a siren in the distance —and blood, blood in the hallway and blood spilling from the door of Millstein's apartment, an astonishing amount of blood. Tom tried to hold Joyce back but she broke away from him, calling out Lawrence's name in a voice that was already mournful.
Fifteen
Armored, alert, and fully powered, Billy identified the scatter of blue luminescence on the apartment door and adjusted his eyepiece to wideband operation. His heart was beating inside him like a glorious machine and his thoughts were subtle and swift.
The corridor was empty. The keen apparatus of Billy's senses catalogued the smell of cabbage, roach powder, mildewed linoleum; the dim floral pattern of the wallpaper; the delicate tread and pressure of his feet along the floor.
He burned open the lock with a finger laser and moved through the doorway with a speed that caused the hinges to emit a squeal, as of surprise.
He closed the door behind him.
The apartment was long and rectangular, with a door open into what appeared to be the kitchen and another door, closed, on what was probably a bedroom. A window at the far end of the rectangle showed the night silhouette of the Fourteenth Street Con Edison stacks through a burlap curtain tied back to a nail. The wall on the left was lined with bookshelves.
The room was empty.
Billy stood for a silent moment, listening.
This room and the kitchen were empty . . . but he heard a faint scuffle from the bedroom.
He smiled and moved through that door as efficiently as he had moved through the first.
This room was smaller and even shabbier. The walls were dirty white and bare except for a crudely framed magazine print of an abstract painting. The bed was a mattress on the floor. There was a man in the bed.
Billy ceased smiling, because this wasn't the man he had followed from Lindner's.
This was some other man. This was a tall, pigeon-chested, naked man snatching a cotton sheet over himself and squinting at Billy in the darkness with gap-jawed astonishment.
The man on the mattress said, "Who the fuck are you?"
"Get up," Billy said.
The man didn't get up.
He doesn't know what I am, Billy realized. He thinks I'm an old man in a pair of goggles. It's dark; he can't see very well. Maybe he thinks I'm a thief.
Billy corrected this impression by burning a hole in the mattress beside the naked man's outstretched left arm. The hole was wide and deep. It stank of charred kapok and cotton and the waxy smoke of the wood floor underneath. The hole was black and began immediately to burn at the edges; the naked man yelped and smothered the flames with his blanket. Then he looked up at Billy, and Billy was pleased to recognize the fear in his eyes. This was the kind of fear that would make him abject, malleable; not yet a panicked fear that would make him unpredictable.
"Stand up," Billy repeated.
Standing, the man was tall but too thin. Billy disliked his fringe of beard, the bump of his ribs, the visible flare of his hip bones. His penis and shriveled scrotum dangled pathetically between his legs.
Billy imagined burning away that sack of flesh, altering this man in something like the way the Infantry doctors had altered Billy himself . . . but that wasn't good strategy.
Billy said, "Where's the man who lives here?"
The naked man swallowed twice and said, "I'm the man who lives here."
Billy walked to the wall and switched on the light. The light was a sixty-watt bulb hanging on a knotted cord, smoke from the charred mattress swimming around it. Billy's eyepiece adapted at once to this new light, damping its amplification. The naked man blinked and squinted.
He stared at Billy. "My God," he said finally. "What are you?
Billy knew the question was involuntary and didn't require an answer. He said, "Tell me your name." "Lawrence Millstein," the naked man said. "Do you work at a shop called Lindner's Radio Supply?" "No."
This was true. Billy heard its trueness in the quaver of the man's voice; in the overtones of his terror. "Do you live here alone?" "Yes."
This was true, also.
"A man came here from Lindner's," Billy said. "Do you know a man who works at Lindner's?" "No," Lawrence Millstein said.
But this was a lie, and Billy responded to it instantly: he narrowed the beam of his wrist weapon and used it to slice off the tip of Lawrence Millstein's left-hand index finger at the top knuckle. Millstein stood a moment in dumb incomprehension until the pain and the stink of his own charred flesh registered in his brain. He looked down at his wounded hand.
His knees folded and he sank back to the ruined mattress. Billy said reproachfully, "You know the man I mean."
"Yes," Millstein gasped.
"Tell me about him," Billy said.
All this reminded Billy of that time long ago, in the future, in Florida, and of the woman who had died there.
Those memories welled up in him while he extracted Lawrence Millstein s confession.
Billy remembered the shard of glass and the woman's name, Ann Heath, and the way she had repeated it to herself, Ann Heath Ann Heath, with the blood on her face and throat and soaking the front of her shirt like a bright red bib.
He had come northwest from the ruins of Miami with his comrades Hallo well and Piper, a fierce storm on their heels. Cut out of their platoon in an ambush, they had retreated in the face of superior fire through a maze of suburban plexes and windowless pillbox dwellings whipped by a torrent of wild ocean air, the barometer low and falling. The night was illuminated by arcs of lightning along the eastern horizon, where a wall of cloud rotated around the fierce vacuum of its core. They ran and didn't much speak. They had given up hope of finding friend
ly territory—they wanted only some space between themselves and the insurgency before they were driven to shelter.
Billy had grown used to the wind like a fist at his back by the time they saw the house.
It was a house much like all the other houses on this littered empty street, a low bunker of the type advertised as "weatherproof" after the first disasters in the Zone. Of course, it wasn't. But its roof was intact and the walls seemed secure and defensible and it must have survived a great many storms relatively intact. It was whole; that was what drew Billy's attention.
Most of these buildings were empty, but there was always the possibility of squatters; so Brother Hallowell, a tall man and thick-chested under his armor, vaulted a chain fence and circled to the back while Billy and Brother Piper launched a concussion weapon through the narrow watch slot next to the door. Billy grinned as the door whooshed open and white smoke billowed out into the rain. He stepped inside and felt his eyepiece adjust to the darkness; he pulled a pocket extinguisher from his belt and doused the burning carpet. Brother Piper said, "I'll do the back door for Brother Hallowell," and started for the rear of the house while Billy sealed the front against the gusting rain, thinking how good it would be to be dry for a night . . . but then things turned strange very quickly. Brother Piper began shouting something incomprehensible, Brother Hallowell thumped at the rear door, while machine bugs came pouring out of the walls, out of hiding places in the plasterboard, from crates and boxes Billy had mistaken for squatters' refuse—thousands of glistening jewel-like creatures Billy could only dimly identity as mechanical. Brother Piper screamed as they swarmed up his legs. Billy had heard of Brazilian weapons imported by the insurgents, tiny poisonous robots the size of centipedes, and he reached by instinct for the machine-killer on his belt: a pulse bomb the size of a walnut, which he triggered and tossed against the far wall; it exploded without much concussion but with a burst of electromagnetic radiation strong enough to overload anything close. Even Billy's armor, which was hardened against such pulses, seemed to hesitate and grow heavy; his eyepiece dimmed and read him nonsense numbers for a long second. When his vision cleared the machine bugs were silent and motionless. Brother Piper was shaking them off his leg in a wild dance. Then Brother Hallowell, who was their CO, came through a doorway from the back and said, "What the fuck? I had to dump two pulses just to get in here and I put a third downstairs—this place has a big cellar. Brother Billy, do you know what these little bugs are?"