A Bridge of Years

Much later. Maybe never. There was something perverse about the act. It felt wrong, to disturb that i

Then he thought, But I have to call them. I have to warn them.

Warn them not to go traveling up the coast highway on a certain date some fifteen years from now.

Warn them, in order to save their lives. So that Tom could go to med school, as his father had insisted; so that he wouldn’t meet Barbara, wouldn’t marry her, wouldn’t divorce her, wouldn’t buy a house up the Post Road, wouldn’t travel into the past, wouldn’t make a phone call, wouldn’t warn them, wouldn’t save their lives.

Would, perhaps, loop infinitely between these possibilities, as ghostly as Schroedinger’s cat.

This was the past, Tom told himself, and the past must be immutable—including the death of his parents. Nothing else made sense. If the past was fluid and could be changed, then it was up to Tom to change it: warn airliners about bombs, waylay Oswald at the Book Depository, clear the airport lobbies before the gunmen arrived … an impossible, unbearable burden of moral responsibility.

For the sake of sense and for the sake of sanity, the past must be a static landscape. If he told Pan Am a plane was going to go down, they wouldn’t believe him. If he flew to Dallas to warn the President, he’d miss his plane or suffer a heart attack at the luggage carousel. He didn’t know what unseen hand would orchestrate these events, only that the alternative was even less plausible. If he tried to change history, he would fail … that was all there was to it. Dangerous even to experiment.

But he thought about that call often. Thought about warning them. Thought about saving their lives.

It was hardly urgent. For now and for many years to come they were alive, happy, young, safer than they knew.

But as the date drew closer—if he stayed here, if he lived that long—then, Tom thought, he might have to make the call, risk or no risk … or know they had died when he could have saved them.

Maybe that was when the fear began.

He slept with these thoughts, woke chastened, and rode the bus to Lindner’s. He regarded the girl on the calendar with a new sobriety. Today her expression seemed enigmatic, clouded.

“You’re still in love with her,” Max observed. “Look at her face, Max. She knows something.”

“She knows you’re a lunatic,” Max said.

He lost himself in his work. The day’s biggest surprise was a call from Larry Millstein: apologies for the incident at the party and would he come over that afternoon? Meet Joyce at the apartment, the three of them could go to di

“Should I be nice? Is it worth the trouble?”

“Be nice. He’s neurotic and he can be mean sometimes. But if he were a total loss I would never have slept with him in the first place.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“You both like jazz. Talk about music. On second thought, don’t.”

He left the shop at six. It was a warm afternoon, the buses were crowded; he decided to walk. The weather had been fine for days. The sky was blue, the air was reasonably clean, and he had no reason to feel uneasy.

Nevertheless, the uneasiness began as soon as he stepped out of Lindner’s front door and it intensified with every step he took.

At first he dismissed it. He’d been through some novel experiences in the last few months and a little paranoia, at this stage, was perhaps not too surprising. But he couldn’t dismiss the uneasiness or the thoughts it provoked, memories he had neglected: of the tu

He recalled the rubble in the sub-basement of the building near Tompkins Square. Someone had been there before him, someone dangerous. But Tom had passed that way safely, and his anonymity would be guaranteed in a city as vast as New York—wouldn’t it?

He told himself so. Nevertheless, as he walked east on Eighth toward Millstein’s shabby East Village neighborhood, his vague anxiety resolved into a solid conviction that he was being followed. He paused across the street from Millstein’s tenement building and turned back. Puerto Rican women moved between the stoops and storefronts; three children crossed the street at a fight. There were two Anglos visible: a large, pale woman steering a baby stroller and a middle-aged man with a brown paper bag tucked under his arm. So who in this tableau was stalking him?

Probably no one. Bad case of coffee nerves, Tom thought. And maybe a little guilt. Guilt about what he’d left behind. Guilt about what he’d found. Guilt about falling in love in this strange place.

He stepped off the curb and into the path of an oncoming cab. The driver leaned into his horn and swerved left, passing him by inches, UNIDENTIFIED MAN KILLED ON CITY STREET—maybe that was history, too.

After some nervous overtures they adjourned to Stanley’s, where Millstein drank and relaxed.

They talked about music in spite of Joyce’s warning. It turned out Millstein had been an avid jazz fan since he arrived here, “a callow youth from Brooklyn,” at the end of the forties. He was an old Village hand; he’d met Kerouac once or twice—an observation which plunged Tom into one more “time travel” epiphany. Giants had walked here, he thought. “Though of course,” Millstein added, “that scene is long dead.”

Joyce mentioned her friend Susan. Susan had written another letter from the South, where she was getting death threats because of her affiliation with the SNCC. One enterprising recidivist had delivered a neatly wrapped package of horse manure to the door of her motel room.

Millstein shrugged. “Everybody’s too political. It’s tiresome. I’m tired of protest songs, Joyce.”

“And I’m tired of passive pseudo-Zen navel-gazing,” Joyce said. “There’s a world out there.”

“A world run by men in limousines who don’t much listen to music. As far as the world is concerned, guitar playing is a minor-league activity.”

Joyce inspected the depths of her beer. “Maybe Susan’s right, then. I should be doing something more direct.”

“Like what? Freedom riding? Picketing? Essentially, you know, it’s still guitar playing. It’ll be tolerated as long as it serves some purpose among the powerful—federalism, in the present instance. And tidied up when they’re done with it.”

“That’s about the most cynical thing I’ve heard you say, Lawrence. Which covers some territory. Didn’t Gandhi make a remark about ‘speaking truth to power’?”

“Power doesn’t give a flying fuck, Joyce. That should be obvious.”

“So what’s the alternative?”

“Il faut cultiver notre jardin. Or write a poem.”

“Like Ginsberg? Ferlinghetti? That’s pretty political stuff.”

“You miss the point. They’re saying, here’s the ugliness, and here’s my revulsion—and here’s the mystery buried in it.”

“Mystery?”

“Beauty, if you like.”

“Making art out of junk,” Joyce interpreted. “You could say that.”

“While people starve? While people are beaten?”

“Before I starve,” Millstein said. “Before I’m beaten. Yes, I’ll make these beautiful objects.”

“And the world is better for it?”

“The world is more beautiful for it.”

“You sound like the Parks Commission.” She turned to Tom. “How about you? Do you believe in poetry or politics?”

“Never gave much thought to either one,” Tom said.

“Behold,” Lawrence said. “The Noble Savage.”

Tom considered the question. “I suppose you do what you have to. But we’re all pretty much impotent in the long run. I don’t make national policy. At most, I vote. When it’s convenient. Henry Kissinger doesn’t drop in and say, ‘Hey, Tom, what about this China thing?’ ”