And even if someone died, it would be a death already entered into the history books. No graves would be filled that weren’t already full. The tragedy of the world would march on, but at least he would have its measure.
He heard an echo of Barbara from that chamber in his head where memories lived and sometimes spoke: Are you really so frightened of the future?
After Chernobyl, after Tiananmen Square, after his divorce? In a world where tritium regularly disappeared from scheduled shipments, where the national debt was coming due, where the stock market resembled an Olympic high-dive competition? Scared of the future, here in the world of teen suicide and the cost-effective assault rifle? Scared?—while the Brazilian rain forests clouded the atmosphere with their burning and the skin cancer rate had become an artifact of the evening news? What, frightened? Who, me?
I’ll go back one more time, he wrote. At least to look. To be there. At least once. Any other questions?
Yes, he thought. Many. But he chose not to write them down.
When Tom glanced up from the paper he saw that several of the larger machine bugs had climbed the table leg and were carrying their dead compatriot away.
Maybe to replace it, Tom thought. Maybe to repair it: they were big on repairing things. Or maybe to bury it, to inter it in some metallic grave while they gathered around and sang electromagnetic hymns.
They made a bright, glassy line against the kitchen tiles as they marched away. He didn’t interfere.
One more time, he promised himself, at least to see—all decisions postponed until then. He decided he’d provision himself for a weekend trip and in the meantime lead a normal life, as impossible as that sounded.
Astonishingly, the charade was a success. He put in good hours at work. Tony invited him for a family dinner and that worked out well, too, with Tony and Loreen making casual but pointed inquiries about his health and his “attitude,” Tom fending them off with carefully fuzzy answers. Time passed easily except at night, when his doubts came sneaking back like guilty prodigals. He installed a hardware store deadbolt on the door leading into the back basement—not that this would stop any serious traffic coming up the tunnel, but it was a useful psychological prop, a sleeping aid, like the small white pills he bought at the Valu-Save Pharmacy. He found some popular histories of the 1960s in the library and invested some study in the first third of that decade, everything up to the Kennedy assassination. It struck him as an oddly quiescent time, large events jostling in the wings but not quite ready to put in an appearance on stage. Call it a nervous appendage of the fifties. He began to recognize names: Gagarin, Khrushchev, John Glenn, Billie Sol Estes— but history paled in the face of this enormity, his secret shortcut through the maze of years and death. The week wheeled on.
He woke up before dawn Saturday morning, marked the space between the wall studs and carved an opening with a keyhole saw—he was getting good at this.
At the opposite end of the tunnel he noted with relief that the rubble had not been disturbed—only his own footprints in the dust—and that the broken lock on the adjoining door had not been replaced.
No one knows yet.
He was safe here still.
He left the tunnel and ventured into the street on a cool and cloudy spring morning. Time passed at the same rate, he noted, here and at home, though the seasons were out of synchronization by a couple of months. He wrote down the street number of the tenement building he emerged from and then the street as he passed the sign at an intersection. Then simply walked. He was a tourist. That was what he’d say if anyone asked. I’m from out of town. Basic and quite true.
Of course, he got lost.
He had been to New York on business trips for Aerotech but his grasp of the city’s geography was vague at best. He walked across Fourteenth Street to Fifth Avenue with the notion that he might find some familiar landmarks … but he didn’t want to stray that far from the tunnel.
Not that he would have a hard time finding his way back; the address was there in his pocket. But he couldn’t hail a cab and he couldn’t even buy a tourist map in a dimestore; his money was useless—or at least ran the risk of being mistaken for counterfeit—unless he put it in a vending machine. He told himself that getting lost wasn’t such a bad thing; that he had planned to spend the day wandering—aimlessly or otherwise.
But it was hard to navigate coherently. He walked in a daze, blinded by the miraculous. The most prosaic object—a woman’s hat in a milliner’s window, a billboard, a chromium hood ornament—would suddenly capture all his attention. They were tokens of the commutation of time, bodies risen from the grave. He could not say which was stranger, his own numbing awareness of the transiency of these things or the nonchalance of the people he passed—people for whom this was merely the present, solid as houses.
It made him grin. It made him shiver.
Of the people he passed, many must have died by 1989. These are the lives of the dead, Tom thought. These are their ghost-lives, and I’ve entered into them. If they’d known, they might have looked at him twice. He was a cold wind from the land of their children … one more cold wind on a cold afternoon.
It was afternoon now, and colder than it had been, and the rain started again; a bitter, squalling rain that ran down his collar and seemed to pool, somehow, at the base of his spine. From Fifth Avenue he crossed Washington Square North into the park. He recognized the arch from one of his visits to the city, but that arch had been a canvas for spray-paint graffiti; this arch was visibly marble, if not pristine. He found a bench (the rain had subsided a little) and occupied it while he calculated his route home; then a young woman in harlequin-rimmed glasses and a black sweater stopped and looked at him—really looked—and asked him his name, and wondered whether he had anywhere to go.
Her name was Joyce Casella. She bought him coffee.
She took him home.
He woke once in the night. Waking, he unfolded his memory of the day and examined it—read it like a text, for clues. The mystery was what he ought to do next. He had come a great distance without a compass.
A siren wailed in the outer darkness. He stood up, here in this shabby room in the city of New York in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-two, stumbled through a dim wash of streetlight to the bathroom and pissed into the rusty porcelain bowl. He was embedded in a miracle, he thought, not just the miracle of 1962 but the miracle of its dailiness, of this toothpaste-stained 1962 medicine cabinet, this 1962 bottle of aspirin, this leaky 1962 faucet …
He rinsed his face and shook off a little sleep. Three forty-five in the morning, according to the digital watch he’d bought at a Kresge’s a quarter century or so in the future. He leaned against the tiled wall and listened to the rain beat against a narrow window. He was full of thoughts he hadn’t allowed himself for a long, long time.
How much he missed sharing his home with a woman, for instance.
He liked Joyce and he liked the sensation of being in her apartment, of seeing—for the first time in nearly a year—a bathroom shelf stocked with Midol and a tampon box; seeing her hairbrush, her toothpaste (neatly rolled from the bottom), a Sloan Wilson novel splayed open on the back of the toilet tank. Sharing these small, quotidian intimacies reminded him how thirsty he had been for intimacy in general. This tiny oasis. Such a dry and formidable desert.
“Thank you, Joyce,” he said—aloud, but not loud enough that she might hear him in her bedroom. “Shelter from the storm. That’s really nice.”
Cold rain spattered against the window. The radiator clanked and moaned. Outside, in the dark, the wind was picking up.