Charles Wilson - A Bridge of Years

The machine bugs conveyed no response—except perhaps the dim mental equivalent of a shrug—and carried on their strange commerce between the house and the depths of the woods.

The next morning, when he turned on the TV set, it emitted a crackle of static, flared suddenly brighter, and displayed a message:

HELP US TOM WINTER

Tom had just stepped out of the shower; he was wearing a bathrobe and carrying a cup of coffee. He failed to notice when the coffee splashed over his hand and onto the carpet, though the skin around the web of his thumb was red for the rest of the day.

The letters blinked and steadied.

“Jesus Christ!” he said.

The TV responded,

HELP US

His first instinct was to get the holy hell out of the house and bolt the door behind him. He forced himself to resist it.

He knew the machine bugs had been inside his set; this, he supposed, was why.

He took a large step backward and sat down, not quite voluntarily, on the sofa.

He licked his lips.

He said, “Who are you?”

HELP USfaded out. The screen was blank a few seconds; then new letters emerged:

WE ARE ALMOST COMPLETE

Communication, Tom thought. His heart was still battering against his ribs. He remembered a toy he’d once owned—a Magic 8-Ball; you asked it a question and when you turned it over a message appeared in a little window: yes or no or some cryptic proverb. The letters on his TV screen appeared the same way, welling up from shadowy depths. The memory was peculiar but comforting.

He set aside his coffee cup and thought a moment.

“What do you want from me?”

Pause.

PROTEINS

COMPLEX CARBOHYDRATES

Food, he thought. “What for?”

TO FINISH BUILDING US

“What do you mean—you’re not finished?”

TO FINISH US

Apparently, it was the only answer they meant to give. He considered his next question. “Tell me where you come from.” The pause was longer this time.

TOM WINTER YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW

“I’m curious. I want to know.”

TOM WINTER YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW

Well, maybe not.

He sat back, managed a sip of coffee, and tried to assemble in his mind all the questions that had been vexing him since he moved in.

“What happened to the man who used to live here?”

BROKEN

It was an odd word, Tom thought. “What do you mean, broken?”

NEEDS TO BE REPAIRED

“Is he here? Where is he?”

FOLLOW US

Into the woods, they meant. “No. I don’t want to do that yet. Are you— repairing him?”

NOT FINISHED

“I found the tunnel behind the wall,” Tom said. “Tell me what it is. Tell me where it goes.”

The pause now was very long indeed—he began to think they’d given up. Then more letters appeared:

TOM WINTER A MACHINE

“The tunnel is a machine? I don’t understand.”

THE TUNNEL IS A MACHINE

“Where does it go? Does it go anywhere?”

IT GOES WHERE IT IS

“No, I mean—where does it lead?”

WHERE IT WAS AIMED

This was wonderfully uninformative. They couldn’t hide from him; they wanted his help; but they weren’t willing—or weren’t able—to answer his most basic questions.

Not a good deal, he thought. No bargain.

He said, “I’ll think it over.”

HELP US TOM WINTER

Which reminded him. One more question. He said, “When you talked to me before—when we communicated— how did you do that? Before this, I mean.”

HELP USfaded out and the new message appeared moments later—stark, vivid, matter-of-fact.

WE WERE INSIDE YOU

He sat sharply upright, horrified.

“What do you mean—those little bug machines, like inside the TV? They were inside me?”

He pictured them performing secret surgery in the night. Cutting him open—crawling around. Changing him.

SMALLER

“There are smaller ones?”

TOO SMALL TO PERCEIVE

Microscopic, Tom interpreted. Still—! “They went inside me? Doing what?”

TO TALK

“Inside my head?”

TO COMMUNICATE OUR NEEDS

Pause.

NOT VERY SUCCESSFUL

He was cold, sweating—he needed to understand this. “ Are they inside me now?”

NO

“Am I different? Did they change something?”

NOTHING CHANGED

NOT VERY SUCCESSFUL

Pause.

WE CAN CHANGE YOU IF YOU LIKE

TALK MORE DIRECTLY

“No! Jesus, no thank you!” Empty screen.

Tom ran his hand over his face. Too much information to absorb, here. He thought about machine bugs small enough to slip into his bloodstream. Machine germs. It was a terrifying concept.

He conceived another question …then wondered whether it would be wise to ask.

He said, “If you could have changed me—changed me so we could talk—why didn’t you?”

The TV set hummed faintly.

TOO INTRUSIVE

“What are you saying, that it’s unethical?”

NEED PERMISSION

“Permission not granted!”

HELP US

Tom stood and approached the television in small, cautious sidesteps. Pushing the power switch, he felt like a man trying to disarm a potent, unfamiliar bomb. His hands were still shaking when the screen faded to black.

He stood staring at it a long, frozen moment; then—an afterthought—he reached down and pulled out the plug.

The invasion of his television set left him shaken and ambivalent. On three different occasions he picked up the phone and began dialing Doug Archer’s number. He wanted to talk to someone about this—but “wanted” was too pallid a word. The need he felt was physical, almost violent. But so was its parallel urge: the urge to keep silent. The urge to play these strange cards very close to his chest.

He dialed Archer’s number three times, and once he let it ring a couple of times; but he ended up dropping the receiver in its cradle and turning away. His motives were mixed, and he didn’t want to examine them too closely, but he reasoned that Archer—desperate for some kind of metaphysical revenge on Belltower, Washington—would intrude on what had been exclusively Tom’s magical playground.

He liked Archer. Liked him instinctively. But—and here was a thought he didn’t want to consider too closely—maybe that was another reason for not calling him up. He liked Archer, and he sensed that getting him involved in all this wouldn’t be doing him a favor. Help us, the machine bugs had said. Broken, they had said. Need to be repaired. The implication? Something was wrong here. Something had gone wrong with some very powerful machinery. Tom couldn’t turn away; he’d made his choice. But if he liked Archer—the unwelcome thought persisted—then maybe he ought to keep him well away from this house up along the Post Road.

He went to work during this time—he was even punctual— but his performance suffered; he couldn’t deny it, couldn’t help it. The act of selling secondhand automobiles to even the most willing customer had begun to seem nonsensical, ludicrous. Tom noticed Klein watching him on the lot, his face screwed up into something like The Frown, but this was another irrelevancy. During the hot afternoons Tom achieved a sort of Zen quiescence, as if he were surveying all this bustle from a hot-air balloon. Abstractly, he understood that he needed this job to eat; but he could coast awhile even if he lost it, and there were other jobs. Above all, there was an impossible tunnel hidden behind the sheetrock in his basement; his home was full of gemlike creatures the size of his thumb; his bloodstream carried benign microscopic robots and his TV had begun to talk to him. In the face of which, it was extremely difficult not to smile cheerfully and suggest some alternative ways of disposing of that troublesome 76 Coronet.