Free A Bridge of Years by Robert Charles Wilson Page B

handled them as if they were specimens in a display
case.
    "Read
anything you want," she said.
    He
shook his head. "I don't think I could concentrate."
    Probably
not. And he was shivering. She brought him a big bath towel and a
cotton shirt Lawrence had left behind. "Dry off and change,"
she said. "Sleep if you want." She left him stretched out
on the sofa and went into the "kitchen"—a corner of the
room, really, with a sink and a reconditioned Hotpoint and a cheap
partition—and rinsed a few dishes. Her rent was due and the
severance check from her department store job would cover it;
but that would leave her (she calculated) about seven dollars to live
on until she picked up some music work or another job. Neither was
impossible, but she would have to find a gig or go hungry. But that
was tomorrow's problem—today was today.
    She
left the kitchen passably clean. By the time she'd finished Tom
was asleep on the sofa—stark stone unconscious, snoring a little.
She picked up his watch from the wooden crate table where he'd left
it, thinking, It must be late.
    Then
she did a double-take at the face of the watch, which wasn't a watch
face at all but a kind of miniature signboard where the time was
written in black numerals over a smoke-gray background.
    9:35, it
said, and then dissolved to 9:36. The
little black colon winked continuously.
    Joyce
had never seen such a watch and she assumed it must be very
expensive—surely not a car salesman's watch. But it wasn't a
foreign watch, either. It said "Timex" and "Quartz
Lithium" (whatever that was) and "Water Resistant."
    Very very strange,
she thought. Tom Winter, Man of Mystery.
    She
left him snoring on the couch and moved into the bedroom. She
undressed with the fight off and stretched out on the narrow
spring-creaking bed, relishing the cold air and the clank of the
radiator, the rattle of rainwater on the fire escape. Then she
climbed under the scratchy brown blanket and waited for sleep.

    Mornings
and evenings, she loved this city.
    Sometimes
she slept five hours or less at a time, so she could have more
morning and more night.
    Nights,
especially when she was out with Lawrence and that crowd, she would
simply let herself be swept up in the urgency of their conversation,
talking desegregation or the arms race in some guitar cafe; swept up
by the music, too, legions of folk singers arrowing in on Bleecker
and MacDougal from all over the country these days; in
sawdust-floored rooms filled with her poet friends and folk friends
and "beat" friends, earnest Trotskyites and junkies and
jazz musicians and eighteen-year-old runaways from dingy Midwest
Levit-towns, all these crosscurrents so fiercely focused that on some
nights she believed the pitch-black sky might open in a rapture of
the dispossessed and they would all ascend bodily into heaven. Nights
like that had been common enough this winter and spring that she was
eager for summer, when the pace would double and redouble again.
Maybe Lawrence would publish his poetry or she would find an audience
for her music. And they would be at the eye, then, of this luminous
vortex.
    But
mornings were good, too. This was a good morning. It was good to wake
up and feel the city waking up around her. Since she had lived in New
York the rhythm of the city had become a stabilizing pattern. She had
learned to distinguish the sound of morning traffic from the sound of
afternoon traffic, both distinct from the lonelier siren sound of the
traffic late at night. Morning traffic woke her with promises.
She did not dislike the city until noon; at noon it was coarse, loud,
unruly, plain, and chokingly dull. Lunch hours at Macy's she had
written songs about the night and morning city, little spells against
the crudity of midday.
    Tom
was still asleep on the sofa. Joyce was faintly surprised by
this. She had imagined him vanished in the morning, like a
dream, like smoke. But here he was: substantial in his rumpled
clothes. She heard the clank and