He said, “I’m sorry I’m not immortal.”
She fumbled her key into the front door of the building.
The apartment was hot. Tom stripped down to his T-shirt and briefs; Joyce ducked out of her shirt. The sight of her in the dim light provoked a flash of pleasure. He had lived in this apartment for more than a month and familiarity only seemed to intensify his feelings about her. When he met her she had been emblematic, Joyce who lived in the Village in 1962; now she was Joyce Casella from Minneapolis whose father owned Casella’s Shoe Store, whose mother phoned twice monthly to plead with her to find a husband or at least a better job; whose sister had borne two children by a decent practicing Catholic named Tosello. Joyce who was shy about her thick prescription lenses and the birthmark on her right shoulder. Joyce who carried a wonderful singing voice concealed inside her, like a delicate wild bird allowed to fly on rare and special occasions. This ordinary, daily Joyce was superior to the emblematic Joyce and it was this Joyce he had come to love.
But she was ignoring him. She rummaged through a stack of papers by the bookcase, mainly phone bills; Tom asked her what she was looking for.
“Susan’s letter. The one I was telling Lawrence about. She said I could call. ‘Call anytime,’ she said. She wants me to go down there. There’s so much work to do! Jesus, Tom, what time is it? Midnight? Hey, Tom, is it midnight in Georgia?”
He felt a ripple of worry. “What do you mean—you want to call her tonight?”
“That’s the idea.”
“What for?”
“Make arrangements.”
“What arrangements?”
She stood up. “What I said wasn’t just bullshit. I meant it. What good am I here? I should be down there with Susan doing some real work.”
He was astonished. He hadn’t anticipated this.
“You’re drunk,” he said.
“Yeah, I’m a little drunk. I’m not too drunk to think about the future.”
Maybe Tom was a little drunk, too. The future! This was both funny and alarming. “You want the future? I can give you the future.”
She frowned and set aside the papers. “What?”
“It’s dangerous, Joyce. People get killed, for Christ’s sake.” He thought about the civil rights movement circa 1962. What he recalled was a jumble of headlines filtered through books and TV documentaries. Bombs in churches, mobs attacking buses, Klansmen with riot sticks and sawed-off shotguns. He pictured Joyce in the midst of this. The thought was intolerable. “You can’t.”
She held out the letter, postmarked Augusta.
“They need me.”
“The hell they do. One more earnest white college graduate isn’t going to turn the tide, for Christ’s sake. They have TV. They have pinheaded southern sheriffs beating women on all three networks. They have friends in the Kennedy administration. After the assassination—” He was drunker than he’d realized. He was giving away secrets. But that didn’t matter. “After the assassination they’ll have Lyndon Johnson signing civil rights legislation while Vietnam escalates. You want the future? Vietnam, Woodstock, Nixon, Watergate, Jimmy Carter, Ayatollah Khomeini, the whole fucking parade of cliches, with or without the help of Joyce Casella. Please,” he said. “Please don’t go get killed before we know each other better.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I know you at all. What’s all this shit about the future?”
“That’s where I’m from.”
She looked at him fiercely. “Tell me the truth or get out of my apartment.”
He described in broad and clumsy outline the train of events that had carried him here.
Joyce listened with focused patience but didn’t begin to believe him until he brought out his wallet and unpacked his ID from the card windows—his Washington State driver’s license, his Visa card, an expired American Express card, a card to access bank machines; from the billfold, a couple of tens bearing a mint date twenty years in the future.
Joyce examined all these things solemnly. Finally she said, “Your watch.”
He hadn’t worn it since his first visit; it was in the left-hand pocket of his jeans. She must have seen it. “It’s just a cheap digital watch. But you’re right. You can’t buy those here.”
He backed off and let her contemplate these things. He was a little more sober for the telling of it and he wondered whether this had been a terrible mistake. It must be frightening. God knows, it had frightened him.
But she fingered the cards and the money, then sighed and looked at him fearlessly.
“I’ll make coffee,” she said. “I guess we don’t sleep tonight.”
“I guess we don’t,” Tom said.
She held the cup in both hands as if it were anchoring her to the earth.
“Tell me again,” she said. “Tell me how you came here.” He rubbed his eyes. “Again?”
“Again. Slower.”
He took a deep breath and began.
By the time he finished it was past two a.m. The street outside was quiet, the light of the room seemed strange and sterile. He was dazed, sleepy, hung over. Joyce, however, was wide awake.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Why a tunnel between here and—what’s it called? Bellfountain?”
“Belltower,” Tom said. “I don’t know. I didn’t build it, Joyce. I found it.”
“Anybody could have found it?”
“I suppose so.”
“And no one else used it?”
“Someone must have. At least once. Used it and, I guess, abandoned it. But I don’t know that for a fact.”
She shook her head firmly. “I don’t believe it.”
He felt helpless. He had shown her all the evidence he possessed, explained it as calmly as possible—
“No, I mean—I know it’s true. The cards, the money, the watch—maybe somebody could fake all that, but I doubt it. It’s true, Tom, but I don’t believe it. You understand what I’m saying? It’s hard to look at you and tell myself this is a guy from the year 1989.”
“What more can I do?”
“Show me,” Joyce said. “Show me the tunnel.” This wasn’t the way he had meant it to happen.
He walked with her—it wasn’t far—to the building near Tompkins Square.
“This place?” Joyce said. Meaning: a miracle—here? He nodded.
The street was silent and empty. Tom took his watch out of his pocket and checked it: three-fifteen, and he was dizzy with fatigue, already regretting this decision.
Later Tom would decide that the visit to the tunnel marked a dividing line; it was here that events had begun to spiral out of control. Maybe he sensed it already—an echo of his own future leaking through zones of fractured time.
He was reluctant to take her inside, suddenly certain it was a mistake to have brought her here at all. If he hadn’t been drunk … and then weary beyond resistance …
She tugged his hand. “Show me.”
And there was no plausible way to turn back. He took one more look at the bulk of the building, all those rooms and corridors he had never explored, a single window illuminated in the darkness.
He led her inside. The lobby was vacant, silent except for the buzzing of a defective fluorescent lamp. He grasped the handle of the door that led to the basement.
It wouldn’t turn.
“Trouble?” Joyce inquired.
He nodded, frowning. “It wasn’t locked before. I don’t think it had a lock.” He bent over the mechanism. “This looks new.”