Charles Wilson - A Bridge of Years

“What if you had a choice?”

“What?”

“I’m serious. What if you could step out of the world? What if you knew a place—not a perfect place, but a place where you could live without some of the uncertainties? A place where you knew for sure there wouldn’t be a nuclear exchange in the next thirty years. Where there was disease, but not AIDS. All the human agony—repression, pain, ugliness—but on a slightly less massive scale. And suppose you could predict some of it. Maybe not stop it, but at least stay away from it—floods, plane crashes, terrorist raids. What do you think, Barb, is that a good offer?”

She said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s a hypothetical question.”

“Even hypothetically, it doesn’t make sense.”

“But if there were such a place. If you could go there.”

She thought about it. She meant to answer carefully: the question might be hypothetical but it certainly wasn’t casual. She read the intensity in Tom’s face. “I might be tempted,” she said. “Well, hell. I would be tempted. Who wouldn’t? But in the end—no, I don’t think I’d go.”

He seemed disappointed. “Why not?”

“Lots of reasons. I have business here.”

“Saving the world?”

A small vein of sarcasm. She ignored it. “Maybe doing my share. And there are people—”

“Rafe, for instance?”

“Rafe. Among others, yes. I have a lot to live for, Tom.”

“I wasn’t talking about dying.” I hope not, she thought. But then, what?

Had somebody made him such an offer?

Too weird, she thought. Absolutely too weird. “I would stay here,” she said firmly.

Tom looked at her a long time. She guessed he was weighing the claim, turning it over, judging it. Finally he nodded. “Maybe you would.”

“Is that the wrong answer?”

“No … not really.”

“But it’s not your answer.”

He smiled. “No.”

She stood up. “Tell me again. Before I leave. Tell me you’re all right.”

He walked her to the door. “I’m fine. Just going away for a while.”

“You mean that?”

“I mean that.”

She inspected his face. He was holding something back; but he meant what he said. Her fear had retreated a little— he wasn’t suicidal—but a small nugget of anxiety remained firmly lodged, because something had got hold of him, obviously—some strange tide carrying him beyond her reach.

Maybe forever beyond her reach.

He touched her arm, tentatively. She accepted the gesture and they hugged. The hard part was remembering how much she had loved being held by him. How much she missed it.

She said, “Don’t forget to feed the cat.”

“I don’t have a cat.”

“Dog, then? When I looked in the window—I thought I saw—”

“You must have been mistaken.”

His first real he, Barbara thought. He’d always been a truly lousy liar.

In the corner of the room his TV set flickered into life—by itself, apparently. She guessed he had a timer on it. He said, “You’d better go.”

“Well, what can I say?”

He held her just a little tighter. “I think all we can say is goodbye.”

Tom Winter woke refreshed and ready for the last day he meant to endure in the decade of the 1980s.

It occurred to him that he was checking out only a little ahead of schedule. A few more months, January 1, the ball would drop, the crowds would cheer in the nineties. It was a kind of mass exodus, rats deserting the sinking ship of this decade for the shark-infested waters of the next. He was no different. Only more prudent.

Assuming, of course, the machine bugs would allow him to go.

But he wasn’t afraid of the machine bugs anymore.

He showered, dressed, and fixed himself a hearty meal in the kitchen. It was a fine early-summer day. The breeze through the screen door was just cool enough to refresh, the sky blue enough to promise a lazy afternoon. When he switched off the coffee machine he heard a woodpecker tocking on one of the tall trees out back. Sweet smell of pine and cedar and fresh grass. He’d mown the lawn yesterday.

Almost too lovely to leave. Almost.

He wasn’t really afraid of the machine bugs anymore, and they weren’t afraid of him. Familiarity had set in on both sides. He spotted one now—one of the tiny ones, no bigger than a thumbnail—moving along the crevice where the tile met the wall. He bent down and watched idly as it worked. It looked like a centipede someone had assembled out of agate, emerald, and ruby—a Christmas ornament in miniature. It discovered a fragment of toast, angled toward it, touched it with a threadlike antenna. The crumb vanished. Vaporized or somehow ingested—Tom didn’t know which.

Carefully, he picked up the machine bug and cradled it in the palm of his hand.

It ceased all motion at his touch. Inert, it was prickly and warm against his skin. It looked, Tom thought, like a curio from a roadside gem shop somewhere in Arizona—an earring or a cuff link.

He put it back on the kitchen counter. After a moment it righted itself and scuttled away, taking up its task where he’d interrupted it.

A few nights ago the machine bugs had crawled inside his little Sony TV set, modifying and rebuilding it. He moved into the living room and switched the set on now, sipping coffee, but there was only a glimpse of the “Today” show— thirty seconds of news about a near miss over O’Hare International—and then the picture blanked. The screen turned an eerie phosphorescent blue; white letters faded in.

HELP US TOM WINTER, the TV set said.

He switched it off and left the room.

The TV had almost caught Barbara’s attention yesterday. And his “cat”—one of the bigger bug machines.

In a way, he was grateful to her for seeing these things. The idea still lingered—and was sometimes overwhelming— that he had stepped across the line into outright lunacy; or at least into a lunacy confined to the property line of this house, a focal lunacy. But Barbara had glimpsed these phenomena and he’d been forced to usher her out before she could see more; they were real events, however inexplicable.

Barbara wouldn’t have understood. No, that was the wrong word—Tom couldn’t say he understood these events, either; enormous mysteries remained. But he accepted them.

His acceptance of the evidently impossible was almost complete. Had been sealed, probably, since the night he broke through the basement wall.

He thought about that night and the days and nights after: bright, lucid memories, polished with use.

He pried away big, dusty slabs of gypsum board until the hole was big enough to step through.

The space behind it was dark. He probed with the beam of his flashlight, but the batteries must have been low—he couldn’t find a far wall. There didn’t seem to be one.

What it looked like …

Well, what it looked like was that he had broken into a tunnel approximately as wide as this basement room, running an indefinite distance away under the side yard into the slope of the Post Road hill.

He took another step forward. The walls of the tunnel were a slick, featureless gray; as was the ceiling; as was the floor. It wasn’t a clammy subterranean chamber. It was dry, clean, and dustless—except for the mess he’d made with his crowbar.

And, increasingly, it was light. The tunnel began to brighten as he stood in it. The fight was sourceless, though it seemed to radiate generally from above. Tom glanced down, switched off his flashlight, discovered he was casting a diffuse shadow around his feet.