Charles Wilson - A Bridge of Years

“But there was never Oz. Only one more dark street.”

“Until now.”

“Is this Oz?”

“It might as well be.”

She supposed that was true. “I guess we can’t tell anyone.”

“I don’t think we should, no.”

“And we have to go back in the morning.”

“Yes.”

“We can’t forget about it and we can’t walk away. He needs our help.”

“I think so.”

“But what is he?”

“Well, I think maybe he told us the truth, Catherine. I think he’s a time traveler.”

“Is that possible?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’m past making odds on what’s possible and what isn’t.”

She gestured at the notebook, the newspaper. “So what did you find?”

“They belonged to Tom Winter, I believe. Look.” She pushed aside her chicken and examined the paper. Sunday, May 13, 1962. The Late City Edition.

U.S SHIPS AND 1,800 MARINES ON WAY TO INDOCHINA AREA; LAOS DECREES EMERGENCY … DOCTORS TRANSPLANT HUMAN HEART VALVE … CHURCH IN SPAIN BACKS WORKERS ON STRIKE RIGHTS

The front page had yellowed—but only a little.

“Check out the notebook,” Archer prompted.

She leafed through it. The entries were brief scrawls and occupied the first three pages; the rest of the book was blank.

Troubling Questions, it said at the top.

You could walk away from this, it said.

This is dangerous, and you could walk away.

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.

Thirty years ago, she read. They have the Bomb. Think about it. They have industrial pollution. They have racism, ignorance, crime, starvation—

Are you really so frightened of the future?

I’ll go back one more time. At least to look. To really be there. At least once.

She looked up at Doug Archer. “It’s a sort of diary.”

“A short one.”

“Tom Winter’s?”

“I’d bet on it.”

“What did he do?”

“Walked into a shitload of trouble, it looks like. But that remains to be seen.”

Only later did the obvious next thought occur to Catherine: Maybe we walked into a shitload of trouble, too.

Archer slept on the sofa. In the morning he phoned the Belltower Realty office and told them he was sick—“Death’s door,” he said into the phone. “That’s right. Yup. I know. I know. Yeah, I hope so too. Thanks.”

Catherine said, “Won’t you get into trouble?”

“Lose some commissions, for sure.”

“Is that all right?”

“It’s all right with me. I have other business.” He grinned —a little wildly, in Catherine’s opinion. “Hey, there are miracles happening. Aren’t you a little bit excited by that?”

She allowed a guilty smile. “I guess I am.”

Then they drove down to the Safeway and bought five frozen T-bone steaks for Ben, the time traveler.

Archer visited the house every day for a week, sometimes with Catherine and sometimes without her. He brought food, which the time traveler never ate in his presence—maybe the machine bugs absorbed it and fed it to him in some more direct fashion; he didn’t care to know the details.

Every day, he exchanged some words with Ben.

It was getting easier to think of him as “Ben,” as something human rather than monstrous. The bedclothes disguised most of his deformities; and the white, sebaceous caul where his skull should have been had acquired enough pigmentation, by the third day, to pass for human skin. Archer had been scared at first by the machine bugs all over the house, but they never approached him and never presented any kind of threat. So Archer began to ask questions.

Simple ones at first: “How long were you in the shed?”

“Ten years, more or less.”

“You were injured all that time?”

“I was dead most of that time.”

“Clinically dead?”

Ben smiled. “At least.” .

“What happened to you?”

“I was murdered.”

“What saved you?”

“They did.” The machine bugs.

Or he asked about Tom Winter: “What happened to him?”

“He went somewhere he shouldn’t have gone.” This was ominous. “He traveled in time?”

“Yes.”

“Is he still alive?”

“I don’t know.”

Brief questions, brief answers. Archer let it rest at that. He was trying to get a sense of who this person really was—how dangerous, how trustworthy. And he sensed Ben making similar judgments about him, perhaps in some more subtle or certain way.

Catherine didn’t seem surprised by this. She let Archer sleep in her living room some nights; they ate dinner and breakfast together, talked about these strange events sometimes and sometimes not. Like Archer, she stopped by the Winter house every day or so. “We’re like church deacons,” Archer said. “Visiting the sick.” And she answered, “That’s what it feels like, doesn’t it? How strange.”

It was that, Archer thought. Very strange indeed. And the strangeness of it bolstered his courage. He remembered telling Tom Winter about this, his conviction that one day the clouds would open and rain frogs and marigolds over Belltower. (Or something like that.) And now, in a small way, that had happened, and it was a secret he shared only with Catherine Simmons and perhaps Tom Winter, wherever Tom had gone: absolute proof that the ordinary world wasn’t ordinary at all … that Belltower itself was a kind of mass hallucination, a reassuring stage set erected over a wild, mutable landscape.

“But dangerous, too,” Catherine objected when he told her this. “We don’t really know. Something terrible happened to Ben. He was almost killed.”

“Probably dangerous,” Archer admitted. “You can get out of this if you want. Sell the house, move on back to Seattle. Most likely, you’ll be perfectly safe.”

She shook her head with a firmness he found charming. “I can’t do that, Doug. It feels like a kind of contract. He asked me for help. Maybe I could have walked away then. But I didn’t. I came back. It’s like saying, Okay, I’ll help.”

“You did help.”

“But not just carrying him back to the house. That’s not all the help he needs. Don’t you feel that?”

“Yes,” Archer admitted. “I do feel that.”

He let her fix him a meal of crab legs and salad. Archer hated crab legs—his mother used to buy cheap crab and lobster from a fishing boat down by the VFW outpost—but he smiled at the effort she made. He said, “You should let me cook for you sometime.”

She nodded. “That would be nice. This is kind of weird, you know. We hardly know each other, but we’re nursemaiding this—person out of a time machine.”

“We know each other all right,” Archer said. “It doesn’t take that long. I’m a semi-fucked-up real estate agent living in this little town he kind of loves and kind of hates. You’re a semisuccessful painter from Seattle who misses her grandmother because she never had much of a family. Neither of us knows what to do next and we’re both lonelier than we want to admit. Does that about sum it up?”

“Not a bad call.” She smiled a little forlornly and uncorked a bottle of wine.

The night after that she went to bed with him.

The bed was a creaky, pillared antique in what Catherine called the guest room, off the main hall upstairs. The sheets were old, thin, delicate, cool; the mattress rose around them like an ocean swell.

Catherine was shy and attentive. Archer was touched by her eagerness to please and did his best to return the favor. Archer had never much believed in one-night stands; great sex, like great anything, required a little learning. But Catherine was easy to know and they came together with what seemed like an old familiarity. It was, in any case, Archer thought, a hell of an introduction.