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No doubt that was true. “Doug and Catherine—”
“Have volunteered to help. They’re armed and they know what to do if an alarm sounds.”
He asked the central question: “What about Joyce?”
“Joyce is making a difficult adjustment. She’s endured a great deal. But she volunteered her help as soon as she understood the situation.”
“Might as well make it unanimous,” Tom said.
He found Joyce in the back yard, in a lawn chair, reading the Seattle paper in the shade of the tall pines.
It was a cool day for August; there was a nice breeze bearing in from the west. The air carried the smell of pine sap, of the distant ocean, a faint and bitter echo of the pulp mill. Tom stood a moment, savoring all this, not wanting to disturb her.
He wondered what the headlines were. This wasn’t precisely the present, not exactly the future; he had come here by a twisted path, a road too complex to make linear sense. Maybe some new country had been invaded, some new oil tanker breached.
She looked up from the editorial page and saw him watching her. He came the rest of the way across the lawn.
She was an anachronism in her harlequin glasses and straight hair, beautiful in the shade of these tall trees.
Before he could frame a sentence she said, “I’m sorry about the way I behaved. I was tired and I was sick about Lawrence and I didn’t know how you were involved. Ben explained all that. And thank you for bringing me here.”
“Not as far out of danger as I thought it would be.”
“Far enough. I’m not worried. How’s your shoulder?”
“Pretty much okay. Enjoying the news?”
“Convincing myself it’s real. I watched a little TV, too. That satellite news station, what’s it called? CNN.” She folded the paper and stood up. “Tom, can we walk somewhere? The woods are pretty—Doug said there were trails.”
“Is it a good idea to leave the house?”
“Ben said it would be all right.”
“I know a place,” Tom said.
He took her up the path Doug Archer had shown him some months ago, past the overgrown woodshed—its door standing open and a cloud of gnats hanging inside—up this hillside to the open, rocky space where the land sloped away to the sea.
The sea drew a line of horizon out beyond Belltower and the plume of the mill. In the stillness of the afternoon Tom heard the chatter of starlings as they wheeled overhead, the rattle of a truck out on the highway.
Joyce sat hugging her knees on a promontory of rock. “It’s pretty up here.”
He nodded. “Long way from the news.” Long way from 1962. Long way from New York City. “How does the future strike you?”
The question wasn’t as casual as it sounded. She answered slowly, thoughtfully. “Not as gee-whiz as I expected. Uglier than I thought it would be. Poorer. Meaner. More shortsighted, more selfish, more desperate.”
Tom nodded.
She frowned into the sunlight. “More the same than I thought it would be.”
“That’s about it,” Tom said. “But not as bad as it looks.”
“No?”
She shook her head vigorously. “I talked to Ben about this. Things are changing. He says there’s amazing things happening in Europe. The next couple of decades are going to be fairly wild.”
Tom doubted it. He had watched Tiananmen Square on television that spring. Big tanks. Fragile people.
“Everything is changing,” Joyce insisted. “Politics, the environment—the weather. He says we happen to be living on the only continent where complacency is still possible, and only for a while longer. That’s our misfortune.”
“I suppose it is. What did he tell you, that the future is some kind of paradise?”
“No, no. The problems are huge, scary.” She looked up, brushed her hair out of her eyes. “The man who killed Lawrence, he’s the future too. All the horrible things. Conscription and famine and stupid little wars.”
“That’s what we have to look forward to?”
“Maybe. Not necessarily. Ben comes from a time that looks back on all that as a kind of insanity. But the point is, Tom, it’s the future—it hasn’t happened yet and maybe it doesn’t have to, at least not that way.”
“Not logical, Joyce. The marauder came from somewhere. We can’t wish him out of existence.”
“He’s a fact,” Joyce conceded. “But Ben says anyone who travels into the past risks losing the place he left. Ben himself. If things happen differently he might be orphaned— might go home and find out it’s not there anymore, at least not the way he remembers it. It’s not likely, but it’s possible.”
“So the future is unknowable.”
“I think the future is something like a big building in the fog—you know it’s there, and you can grope your way toward it, but you can’t be sure about it until it’s close enough to touch.”
“Leaves us kind of in the dark,” Tom observed.
“The place you stand is always the present and that’s all you ever really have—1 don’t think that’s a bad thing. Ben says the only way you can own the past is by respecting it— by not turning it into something quaint or laughable or pastel or bittersweet. It’s a real place where real people live. And the future is real because we’re building it out of real hours and real days.”
No world out of the world, Tom thought.
No Eden, no Utopia, only what you can touch and the touching of it.
He took her hand. She gazed across the pine tops and the distant town site toward the sea. “I can’t stay here,” she said. “I have to go back.”
“I don’t know if I can go with you.”
“I don’t know if I want you to.”
She stood up and was beautiful, Tom thought, with the afternoon sun on her hair.
“Hey,” she said. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s just me. Just some fucked-up chick from Mi
He shook his head, was mute.
“I was a ghost for you,” she said. “Ghost of some idea about what life used to be like or could be like or what you wanted from it. But I’m not that. But that’s okay. Maybe you were a ghost too. Ghost of whatever I thought I’d find in the city. Somebody mysterious, wise, a little wild. Well, the circumstances are very strange. But here we are, Joyce and Tom, a couple of pretty ordinary people.”
“Not all that damn ordinary.”
“We hardly know each other.”
“Could change that.”
“I don’t know,” Joyce said. “I’m not so sure.”
These last few hours—before the marauder attacked, or the time machine was repaired, whichever apocalypse happened first—were a kind of Indian summer.
Archer drove to the Burger King out along the highway and brought home di
Ben, who didn’t eat prepared food, was an avuncular presence at the edge of the feast, periodically hobbling over to the redwood fence where he had marked a long rectangular patch with string. It was too late in the year to start a garden, he said, but this was where one ought to be. Tom wondered, but didn’t ask, whether he pla
After dark, Archer took Tom down into the basement—what remained of the basement. The false wall in front of the tu
“We’re ru
“How long until all this is finished?”
“Soon, Ben says. Maybe by this time tomorrow. Here—” He opened a drawer under the workbench: Tom’s woodworking bench, the one he’d moved from Seattle. “Ben said you should have one of these.”