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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 pla
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.
In the morning he found his way home.
“I might be back,” he told Joyce. It wasn’t a promise, but it startled him when he said it. Would he be back? This was a miracle; but was it possible to inhabit a miracle? Miracles, like Brigadoon, had a way of disappearing.
Later, he would think that perhaps it had been a promise, if only to himself … that he had known the answer to these questions all along.
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□ □
His last day in Belltower. His last day in the 1980s.
He drove to work prepared to quit, but Klein finessed that by handing him a pink slip. “You’re a fuck-up in general,” Klein informed him, “but what made up my mind was that deal you wrote on Wednesday.”
The Wednesday deal had been a retired County Court judge. The customer might have had an illustrious career on the bench, but he suffered from what Tom had learned to recognize as a common malady: big-purchase panic. The judge regarded the offer form as if it were a writ of execution and offered full sticker price for a car he’d barely looked at. “Let’s write up a lower offer,” Tom said, “and see what the sales manager has to say.”
He told Klein, “We made money on that deal.”
“I know the son of a bitch,” Klein said. “He comes in every other year. He just toddles in and pays list.”
“Nobody pays list”
“If they’re giving away money,” Klein said, “it’s not your job to turn it down. But I don’t want to argue with you. I just want you off the lot.” He added, “I cleared this with your brother, so don’t go ru
Tom couldn’t help smiling. “I guess that’s right,” he said. “I guess I’m history.”
He phoned Tony and said he was going away for a while. Tony wanted to talk—about the job, about the future. Tom said, “I have to get things sorted out by myself. Thank you for everything, though, Tony. Don’t expect to hear from me for a while.”
“You’re acting crazy,” Tony said.
“This is something I have to do.”
He packed a change of clothes into his knapsack. Money was a problem, but he was bringing along some items he thought he might be able to pawn: the guitar he’d owned since college (bulky but potentially valuable, a Gibson); a set of silver spoons. By Friday noon he was ready to go.
He hesitated when he noticed the TV had been plugged in again. It seemed to sense his presence; as he watched, it flickered to life.
“You’re too late,” he said. “I’m leaving.”
TOM WINTER, WE DON’T THINK YOU SHOULD GO.
Their punctuation had improved. He considered the statement, considered its source. “You can’t stop me,” he said. Probably this was true.
IT’S NOT SAFE WHERE YOU’RE GOING.
“It’s not safe where I am.”
YOU WANT IT TOO BADLY. IT ISN’T WHAT YOU THINK.
“You don’t know what I want. You don’t know what I think.”
Of course, maybe they did—it was entirely possible. But they didn’t contradict him.
YOU CAN HELP US.
“We talked about that.”
WE NEED PROTEINS.
“I don’t know what you mean by that.”
MEAT.
“Meat?” Here was an unforeseen development. “Ordinary meat? Grocery store meat?”
YES, TOM.
“What are you building out in the woods that needs meat?”
WE’RE BUILDING US.
He wanted to dismiss the whole disturbing notion; but it occurred to him that he owed these creatures something. It was their territory he was about to trespass through. And more than that: he’d been in their power for a long time. They had implied that they could have changed him; if they’d wanted a slave they could have made him one. They hadn’t. He owed them.
Nevertheless—“building us”? And they wanted meat?
He said, “I have some steaks in the freezer—”