Free A Bridge of Years by Robert Charles Wilson Page A

"You don't have to buy
me a coffee, but if you want to I'd be grateful." "My name
is Joyce," she said. "Joyce Casella." "Tom
Winter," he said. Early in the month of May 1962.

    She
bought coffee at an unfashionable deli where no one would recognize
her: not because she was embarrassed but because she didn't want a
crowd chasing this man—Tom Winter—away. He was dazed, numbed, and
not entirely coherent; but beneath that she was beginning to
sense a curious edge, perhaps the legacy of whatever journey had
brought him here, or some ordeal, a tempering fire. She talked about
her life, the job she'd lost at Macy's book department, her music,
relieving him of the need to make conversation and at the same time
letting her eyes take him in. Here was a man maybe thirty years old,
wearing clothes that were vaguely bohemian but not ragged, a traveler
with traveler's eyes, who wasn't skinny but had the gauntness of
someone who had ignored meals for too long.
    He
didn't want to talk about himself or how he'd arrived here. Joyce
respected that. She'd met a lot of folks who didn't care to talk
about themselves. People with a past they wanted to hide; or people
with no past, refugees from the suburbs with grandiose visions of the
Village inferred from television and all those self-righteous
articles in Time and Life. Joyce
herself had been one of these, an NYU undergraduate in a dirndl
skirt, and she respected Tom's silence even though his secrets might
be less prosaic than hers.
    He
did say where he was from: a little coastal town in Washington State
called Belltower. She was encouraged by this fracture in his
reticence and ventured to ask what he did there.
    "Lots
of things," he said. "Sold cars." "It's hard to
picture you as a car salesman." "I guess other people
thought so, too. I wasn't very good at it."
    "You
lost your job?"
    "I—well,
I don't know. Maybe I still have it. If I go back."
    "Long
way to go back."
    He
smiled a little. "Long way to come here."
    "So
what brought you to the city?"
    "A
time machine," he said. "Apparently."
    He
had hitchhiked or ridden boxcars, Joyce guessed, a sort of Woody
Guthrie thing; maybe that was what he meant. "Well," she
said, "Mr. Car Salesman, are you planning to stay awhile?"
    He
shook his head no, then seemed to hesitate. "I'm not sure. My
travel arrangements are kind of vague." "You need a place
to stay?"
    He
glanced through the window of the deli ( strictly
kosher ,
like the sign in the Peace Eye Bookstore over at 10th and Avenue C).
Evening now. Traffic labored through the shiny wet darkness.
    "I've
got a place," he said, "but I'm not sure I can find the way
back."
    Joyce
suspected he was right. Coming down off some towering LSD kick,
he'd probably bounce around Manhattan like the little steel ball in a
pachinko machine. Joyce asked herself whether she was convinced of
his harmlessness; she decided she was. Taking
in strangers, she
scolded herself—but it was one of those acts Lawrence had called
"blinks of connection" in a poem. The grace of an
unexpected contact. A kind of touch. "You can sleep on my sofa
if you want. It's not much of a sofa."
    The
offer seemed to provoke fatigue in him. "I would be very happy
to sleep on your sofa. I'm sure it's a wonderful sofa."
    "Very
courtly," she said. "It came from the Salvation Army. It's
purple. It's an ugly sofa, Tom." "Then I'll sleep with my
eyes closed," he said.

    She
lived in a little railroad apartment in the East Village where she
had moved from the dorm at NYU. It was two flights up in a tenement
building and furnished on no budget at all: the ugly purple sofa,
some folding chairs, a Sally Ann standing lamp from the Progressive
Era. The bookcases were made of raw pineboard and paving bricks.
    Tom
stood awhile looking at the books. They were nothing special, her
college English texts plus whatever she'd picked up at secondhand
stores since then. Some C. Wright Mills, Frantz Fanon's The
Wretched of the Earth, Aldous
Huxley— but he