The woman Ann Heath with a wedge of glass in her skull and a hemotropic tube embedded in her chest. Things he had left behind:
Ohio.
His father, Nathan. A town called Oasis.
Miles of kale and green wheat and a sky empty of everything but heat and dust.
Things he couldn’t leave behind: His armor.
And, Billy realized, this place. This building, whatever it was. This tunnel entrance, which he had sealed but which he could not trust: because it contained monsters, because it contained the future.
What had seemed at the time like inspiration, this feverish escape into the past, troubled him now. He had tampered with mechanisms he didn’t understand, mechanisms more powerful than he could imagine. His encounter with the time ghost had been disturbing enough; who else might he have angered? There was so much Billy didn’t understand. He believed he was safe here … but the belief was tempered with fresh new doubts.
But here you are. That was the plain fact of it. Here he was and here he would stay. At least no Infantry; at least no Storm Zone. A place away from all that. Not Ohio with its deserts and canals and the miracle of the harvest, but at least a safe place.
A city in the middle years of the twentieth century.
That night, his first night in the city of New York, Billy undressed the body of the time traveler and used a fan beam to turn the corpse into a dune of feathery white ash.
The clothes were bloodstained and a poor fit, but they allowed Billy to move without attracting attention. He explored the corridors of the tenement building above the sub-basement chamber which contained the tunnel; he explored the nearby streets of the night city. He deduced from the contents of the dead man’s wallet that the time traveler had occupied an “apartment” in this building. Billy located the entrance, one numbered door among many, and fumbled keys into the primitive lock until the door sprang inward.
He slept in the dead man’s bed. He appropriated a fresh suit of clothes. He marveled at the dead man’s calendar: 1953.
He found cash in the dead man’s wallet, more cash in a drawer of his desk. Billy understood cash: it was an archaic form of credit, universal and interchangeable. The denominations were confusing but simple in principle: a ten-dollar bill was “worth” two fives, for instance.
He stayed in the apartment a week. Twice, someone knocked at the door; but Billy was quiet and didn’t answer. He watched television at night. He ate regular meals until there was nothing left in the refrigerator. He sat at the window and studied the people passing in the street.
He kept his armor hidden under the bed. As vulnerable as Billy felt without the armor, he would have been grotesquely conspicuous in it. He supposed he could have worn the body pieces under his clothing and looked only a little peculiar, but that wasn’t the point; he hadn’t come here to wear the armor. He planned not to wear the armor at all … at least, only to wear it when he had to, when the peculiar needs of his altered body demanded it. In a month, say. Two months. Six months. Not now.
When there was nothing left to eat Billy gathered up his cash and left the building. He walked three blocks to a “grocery” and found himself in a paradise of fresh fruit and vegetables, more of these things than he had ever seen in one place. Dazzled, he chose three oranges, a head of lettuce, and a bunch of bright yellow speckled bananas. He handed the checkout clerk a flimsy cash certificate and was nonplussed when the man said, “I can’t change that! Christ’s sake!” Change it to what? But Billy rooted in his pocket for a smaller denomination, which proved acceptable, and he understood the problem when the cashier handed him a fresh selection of bills and coins: his “change.”
Words, Billy thought. What they spoke here was English, but only just.
He acquired his new life by theft.
The custodian, a time traveler, had owned the block of tenement flats above the sub-basement which concealed the tunnel. The deeds were stored in a filing cabinet in the bedroom. For years the time traveler had operated the building strictly as, a formality and most of the apartments were empty. Billy passed himself off as “new management” and accepted the monthly rent checks. The charade was almost ridiculously easy. There was no family to mourn the dead man, no business partners to inquire about his health. By reviewing the documents he learned that the time traveler had registered his business under the name Hourglass Rentals, and Billy was able to discern enough of the local financial customs to manipulate bank deposits and withdrawals and pay the tax bills on time. Hourglass Rentals didn’t generate enough revenue to cover its debts, but the amount of money banked in the company name was staggering—enough to keep Billy in food and shelter for the rest of his life. Not only that, but the management of these fiscal arcana had been streamlined for a single individual to operate without help— an hour of paperwork an evening, once Billy mastered the essentials of bookkeeping and learned which lies to tell the IRS, the city, and the utility companies. By the end of 1952, Billy was Hourglass Rentals.
It suited him to commandeer the life of a loner. Billy was a loner, too.
He guessed the armor had made him that way. He knew the Infantry surgeons had made him dependent on the armor —that without it he was less than a normal human being. Sexually, Billy was a blank slate. He remembered a time when he had wanted the touch of a woman—back in his brief adolescence, before he was prepped, when the physical need had burned like a flame—but that was long ago. Nothing burned in him now but his need for the armor. Now he saw women all the time: women on television, women on city streets, bank tellers, secretaries, women available for money. Occasionally they looked at him. Their looks seldom lingered. Billy guessed there was something about him they could sense—a blankness, a deferral, an inertia of the soul.
It didn’t matter. By the snowy January of 1953 Billy had established a life he was content to lead.
He was far from the Infantry, the Storm Zone, and the prospect of imminent death or court martial. He wasn’t hungry and he wasn’t in physical danger. When he stopped to think about it, it felt a little bit like paradise.
Was he happy here? Billy couldn’t say. Most days passed in blissful oblivion, and he was grateful for that. But there were times when he felt the pangs of a brittle, piercing loneliness. He woke up nights in a city more than a century away from home, and that impossible distance was like a hook in his heart. He thought about his father, Nathan. He tried to remember his mother, who had died when he was little. He thought about his life in exile here, stranded on this island, Manhattan, among people who had been dead a hundred years when he was born. Thought about his life among these ghosts. He thought about time, about clocks: clocks, like words, worked differently here. Billy was accustomed to clocks that numbered time and marked it with cursors, linear slices of a linear phenomenon. Here, clocks were round and symbolic. Time was a territory mapped with circles.
Time and words. Seasons. That January, Billy was caught in a snowstorm that slowed the buses to a crawl. Tired and cold, he decided to check into a hotel rather than walk the distance home. He found an inexpensive boarding hotel and asked the desk clerk for a room with a slut; the clerk showed him a strange smile and said he would have to arrange that himself—he recommended a bar a few blocks away. Billy disguised his confusion and checked in anyway, then realized that in 1953 the word “slut” must have some other meaning —he didn’t need a heated bed; the entire room, the entire hotel was heated. Probably every room in the city was heated, even the vast public spaces of banks and the cavernous lobbies of skyscrapers, all through the bitter winter. He had a hard time grasping this simple fact; when he did, the sheer arrogant monstrosity of it left him dazed and blinking.
Asleep in the snowbound hotel, Billy dreamed of all that heat … a hundred summers’ worth, bubbling up from this city and a dozen cities like it, hovering for decades in invisible cloudbanks and then descending all at once in a final obliteration of the seasons.