“Right now,” Tom said, “I guess I’m a little bit more interesting than you are.”
Millstein threw down his glass and balled his fists. Joyce said, “Stop him!” Soderman stood up in front of Millstein and put a conciliatory hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, calm down. It’s nothing. Hey, Larry—I mean, Lawrence—”
Joyce grabbed Tom’s hand and pulled him toward the door.
“The party is fucking over!” Millstein screamed.
They ducked into the hall.
“Come home with me,” Joyce said.
Tom said that sounded like a good idea.
She undressed with the unselfconsciousness of a cat.
Pale streetlight came glowing through the dusty window. He was startled by her small breasts and pink, pleasant aureoles; by the neat angle of her pubic hair. She smiled at him in the dark, and he decided he was leading a charmed life.
The touch of her was like a long, deep drink of water. She arched against him as he entered her; he felt rusty springs unwind inside him. She had put her glasses on the orange crate by the bed and her eyes were fiercely wide.
Later, as they were drifting into sleep, she told him he made love like a lonely man.
“Do I?”
“You did tonight. Are you lonely?”
“Was lonely.”
“Very lonely?”
“Very lonely.”
She curved against him, breasts and hips. “I want you to stay here. I want you to move in.”
He experienced another moment of pure free-fall. “Is the apartment big enough?”
“The bed is big enough.”
He kissed her in the dark. Charmed life, he thought.
Nineteen sixty-two, a hot summer night.
It was night all over the continent now, skies clear from the Rockies east to the coast of Maine, stars shining down from the uncrowded sky of a slightly younger universe. The nation slept, and its sleep was troubled—if at all—by faint and distant dreams. A dream of Mississippi. The dream of a war that hadn’t quite started, somewhere east of the ocean. The dream of dark empires moving on its borders.
JFK slept. Lee Harvey Oswald slept. Martin Luther King slept.
Tom Winter slept and dreamed of Chernobyl.
He carried this nugget of discontent from the night into the morning.
I am a cold wind from the land of your children, he had thought. But he looked at Joyce—eating a late breakfast at a cheap restaurant at the end of a dirty, narrow, sunlit street— and didn’t want to be that anymore. This was history and history was good because it was immutable; but he worried that he might have brought an infection from the future— not a literal disease but some turbulence in the timestream. Some dark, stalking irregularity that would unravel the fabric of her life. Maybe his certainties were absolutely false. Maybe they would all die in the Soviet attack that followed the missile crisis.
But that was absurd—wasn’t it?
“Sometime soon,” she said, “you’re going to have to tell me who you are and where you came from.”
He was startled by the suggestion. He looked at her across the table.
“I will,” he said. “Sometime.”
“Sometime soon.”
“Soon,” he said helplessly. Maybe it was a promise. Maybe it was a he.
Nine
His name was Billy Gargullo, and he was a farmboy.
He had lived in New York City for ten years now, but hot nights like this still reminded him of Ohio.
Hot nights like this, he couldn’t sleep. Hot summer nights, he left his tiny apartment and moved like a shadow into the streets. He liked to ride the subway; when the subway was crowded, he liked to walk.
Tonight he rode a little, walked a little.
He had left his shiny golden armor safe at home.
Billy seldom wore the armor, but he often thought about it. The golden armor was at home, in the tenement apartment where he had lived for the last decade. He kept the armor in his closet, behind a false wall, in a box no one else could open.
He wore the golden armor seldom; but the golden armor was a part of him, profoundly his own—and that was troublesome. He had left a great many things behind when he came to New York. Many ugly, many shameful things. But some ugly and shameful things had come with him. The armor itself was not ugly or shameful—in its own way it was beautiful, and when Billy wore it he wore it with pride. But he had come to suspect that his need for it was shameful … that the things he did when he wore it were ugly.
This wasn’t entirely Billy’s fault, or so he told himself. The Infantry had performed certain surgeries on him. His need for the armor was real, physical; he wasn’t whole without it. In a sense, Billy was the armor. But the armor wasn’t entirely Billy: the armor had its own motives, and it knew Billy better than any other creature in the world.
It sang to him sometimes.
Most often, it sang about death.
Billy emerged from the roaring machine caves of the subway into the night wilderness of Forty-second Street and Broadway. Midnight had come and gone.
Now as ever, he was startled by the wild exuberance of the twentieth century. All these lights! Colored neon and glaring filaments, powered, he had learned, by mechanical dams spanning rivers hundreds of miles away. And most of this— astonishingly—in the name of advertising.
He paced through Times Square, where the lights were so bright he could hear them sizzle and spit.
Where Billy came from—back on the farm—this frivolous use of electricity would have been called promiscuous. A very bad word. But the word meant something else here … a dissipation of some other energy entirely.
Words had troubled him from the day he arrived in New York.
He had arrived in a fury of blood and noise, disgorged into the sub-basement of an old building through a fracture in the firmament of time—frightened of what he had seen there; frightened of what might be waiting for him. He detonated EM pulses, brought a wall tumbling down, and killed the man (a time traveler) who tried to stop him.
When the dust settled, he crouched in a corner and considered his options.
He thought about the monster he’d encountered in the tunnel.
The monster was called a “time ghost”—Ann Heath had warned him about it before she died.
The fiery apparition had terrified Billy even through the haze of chemical courage pumped into him by his armor. The time ghost was like nothing he had ever seen and Billy sensed—he couldn’t say how—that its interest in him was particular, personal. Maybe it knew what he’d done. Maybe it knew he had no place in this maze of time; that he was a deserter, a criminal, a refugee.
The monster had appeared as he reached the end of the tunnel, and Billy felt the heat of it and the subtler weight of its hostility; and he had run from it, a terrified sprint through the terminal doorway to this place, a safe place where the monster couldn’t follow—or so Ann Heath had told him.
Nevertheless, Billy was still frightened.
He had a rough idea where he was. Mid-twentieth century. Some urban locus. He had killed the custodian of this place and a few more pulse detonations would sweep it clean of cybernetics. But Billy crouched in the corner of the dimly fit sub-basement—in the stench of fused plaster and cinder-block and a fine gray dust from the damaged tunnel—and understood that his exile was permanent.