Free A Bridge of Years by Robert Charles Wilson

from you."
    "I
think we've been overreacting, is all."
    "Tom,
is something wrong up there? Some kind of problem?"
    "No
problem at all."
    "I
should at least drop by to pick up the video equipment—"
    "Maybe
on the weekend," Tom said.
    "If
that's what you want—"
    "That's
what I want."
    He
hung up the phone.
    If
there's treasure here, he
thought, it's
mine.
    He
turned back to the basement.
    The
house hummed and buzzed around him.
Four
    Because
it was Monday, because she had lost her job at Macy's, because it was
a raw and intermittently rainy spring day—and maybe because the
stars or Kismet or karma had declared it so—-Joyce stopped to say
hello to the strange man shivering on a bench in Washington Square
Park.
    The
gray, wet dusk had chased away everybody but the pigeons. Even the
nameless bearded octogenarian who had appeared last week selling
"poetry" on cardboard box bottoms had moved on, or
died, or ascended to heaven. Some other day the square might be
thronged with guitar strummers, NYU kids, teenage girls from uptown
private schools making (what they imagined was) The Scene; but for
now the park belonged to Joyce and to this odd, quiet man who looked
at her with startled eyes.
    Of
course, it was silly and maybe even dangerous to stop and talk. This
was New York, after all. Strange men were hardly in short supply;
their strangeness was seldom subtle or interesting. But Joyce had
good intuition about people. "Sharp-eyed Joyce" Lawrence
had called her. "The Florence Nightingale of love." She
rejected the implication (though here she was again, perhaps: taking
in strays), but accepted the judgment. She knew who to trust. "You're
lost," she said.
    He
looked up at her and managed a smile. A certain effort there, she
thought.
    "No,"
he said. "Not really. I figured it out. New York City. I'm in
New York. But the date . . ." He held out his hands in a
helpless gesture.
    Oh, Joyce
thought. But he wasn't an alcoholic. His eyes were bright and clear.
He might have been schizophrenic, but his face didn't radiate the
pained perplexity Joyce had seen in the faces of the schizophrenics
she'd met. (There had been a few, including her uncle Teddy, who was
in a "care home" upstate.) Not an alcoholic, not a
schizo—maybe he had taken something. There were some odd pills
circulating around the Village these days. Dexadril was popular,
LSD-25 was easy to come by. An out-of-towner who had picked up
something at the Remo: that was possible. But not really a tourist.
The man was dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt open at the collar,
and he wore the clothes comfortably; they weren't some outfit he had
cobbled together for an afternoon of slumming. So perhaps he is One
of Us after all, Joyce thought, and this fraternal possibility moved
her to sit down next to him. The bench was wet and the rainwater
soaked through her skirt; but she was already wet from dashing out of
the West Fourth Street station of the IND. Okay to be wet on a cold
afternoon at dusk because eventually you'd find a comfortable place
to get dry and warm and then it was all worth it. "You look like
you could use a cup of coffee."
    The
man nodded. "Sure could."
    "You
have money?"
    He
touched his left hip. Joyce heard the change jingle in his pocket.
But his face was suddenly doubtful. "I don't believe I do."
    She
said cautiously, "How do you feel?"
    He
looked at her again. Now there was focus in his eyes— he understood
the drift of the question.
    "I'm
sorry," he said. "I know how this must seem. I'm sorry I
can't explain it. Did you ever have an experience you just couldn't
take in all at once—something so enormous you just can't comprehend
it?"
    The
LSD, she thought. Down the rabbit hole for sure. A naif in chemical
wonderland. Be
nice, she
instructed herself. "I think coffee would probably help."
    He
said, "I have money. But I don't think it's legal tender."
    "Foreign
currency?"
    "You
could say that."
    "You've
been traveling?"
    "I
guess I have." He stood up abruptly.