A Bridge of Years

Two


It wasn't long before a single question came to occupy his mind almost exclusively: What was madness, and how do you know when it happens to you?

The cliche was that the question contained its own answer. If you're sane enough to wonder, you must be all right. Tom had trouble with the logic of this. Surely even the most confirmed psychotic must sometimes gaze into the mirror and wonder whether things hadn't gone just a little bit wrong?

The question wasn't academic. As far as he could figure, there were only two options. Either he had lost his grip on his sanity—and he wasn't willing to admit that yet—or something was going on in this house.

Something scary. Something strange.



He shelved the question for three days and was careful to clean up meticulously: no dirty dishes in the sink, no crumbs on the counter, garbage stowed in the back yard bin. The Tidiness Elves had no scope for their work and Tom was able to pretend that he had actually done the dishes himself the night he went to Tony's: it must have been his memory playing a trick on him.

These were his first days at Arbutus Ford and there was plenty to occupy his mind. He spent most of his daylight hours studying a training manual or bird-dogging the senior salesmen. He learned how to greet buyers; he learned what an offer sheet looked like; he learned how to "T.O."—how to turn over a buyer to the sales manager, who could eke out a few more dollars on an offer; who would then T.O. the customer to the finance people. ("Which is where the real money's made," the sales manager, Billy Klein, cheerfully confided.)

The lot was a new/used operation down along the flat stretch of Commercial Road between Belltower and the suburban malls. Tom sometimes thought of it as a paved farm field where a crop of scrap metal had sprouted but not ripened—everything was still sleek and new. The weather turned hot on Wednesday; the days were long, the customers sparse. Tom drank Cokes from sweating bottles and studied his system manual in the sales lounge. Most of the salesmen took breaks at a bar called Healy's up the road, but they were a fairly hard-drinking crowd and Tom wasn't comfortable with that yet. Lunchtimes, he scuffed across the blistering asphalt to a little steak and burger restaurant called The Paradise. He was conserving his money. He might make a respectable income on commissions in an average month, Klein assured him—assuming he started selling soon. But it was a grindingly slow month. Evenings he drove inland through the dense, ancient pine forest and thought about the mystery of the house. Or tried not to.

Two possibilities, his mind kept whispering.

You're insane.

Or you're not alone here.



Thursday night, he put three greasy china plates on the counter next to the stainless steel sink and went to bed.

In the morning the dishes were precisely where he had left them—as smooth and clean as optical lenses.

Friday night, he dirtied and abandoned the same three plates. Then he moved into the living room, tuned in the eleven o'clock news and installed himself on the sofa. He left the lights on in both rooms. If he moved his head a few degrees to the right he had a good view of the kitchen counter. Any motion would register in his peripheral vision.

This was scientific, Tom reassured himself. An experiment.

He was pleased with himself for approaching the problem objectively. In a way, it was almost exciting—staying up late waiting for something impossible to happen. He propped his feet on the coffee table and sprang the tab on a soda can.

Half an hour later he was less enthusiastic. He'd been keeping early hours; it was hard not to nod off during commercial breaks. He dozed a moment, sat upright and shot a glance into the kitchen. Nothing had changed.

(Well, what had he expected? Gnomes in Robin Hood hats humming "Whistle While You Work"? Or maybe—some perverse fraction of his mind insisted—creatures like rats. With clackety claws and saucer eyes.)

The "Tonight" show was less than engaging, but he wasn't stuck with Carson: the local cable company had hooked him up last week. He abused the remote control until it yielded an antique science fiction film: Them, featuring James Whitmore and giant ants in the Mojave. In the movies radiation produced big bugs; in the neighborhood of failed fission reactors it mainly caused cancer and leukemia—the difference, Barbara had once observed, between Art and Life. He was nodding off again by the time the ants took refuge in the storm drains of Los Angeles. He stood up, walked to the kitchen— where nothing had changed—and fixed himself a cup of coffee. Now, mysteriously, it felt late: no traffic down the Post Road, a full moon hanging over the back yard. He carried his coffee into the living room. It occurred to him that this was a fairly spooky activity he had selected here: making odds on his own sanity, sometime after midnight. He had done things like this—well, things this reminded him of—when he was twelve years old, sleeping in the back yard with a flashlight or staying up with the monster flicks all by himself. Except that by now he would have given up and found some reassuring place to spend the night.

Here, there was only the house. Probably safe. Hardly reassuring.

He found an all-night Seattle station showing sitcom reruns. He propped himself up on the sofa, drained the coffee, and hoped the caffeine would help keep him awake. It did, or at least it put him on edge. Edgy, he remembered what he had come to think of as his father's credo: The world is a cold, thoughtless place and it has no special love for human beings. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe he should go to bed, let the elves wash up, wake up bright and early and put the house back on the market. No law required him to become the Jacques Cousteau of the supernatural. That wasn't what he'd signed up for.

But maybe there was nothing supernatural about it. Something odd but entirely explainable might be at work. Some kind of bacteria. Insects (nonmutated). Anything. If he had to bet, that's where he'd put his money.

It was just that he wanted to know—really know.

He stretched out on the sofa. He meant to rest his head against the padded arm. He had no intention of going to sleep.

He closed his eyes and began to dream.



This time, the dream came without preamble.

In the dream he stood up from the sofa, went to the window and raised the sash.

The moon was low, but it cast a clear fluorescence over the back yard. In the dream, it seemed at first as if nothing had changed; there was the starry sky, the deep shadow of the forest, the bleached cedar fence obscure under ivy. Then he saw the grass moving in the wind, a curious sinewy motion— but there was no wind; and Tom understood that it wasn't the grass moving, it was something in the grass—something like insects, a hundred or more, moving in a snakelike column from the house into the woods. His heart gave a startled jump and he was suddenly afraid, but he couldn't look away or leave the window . . . somehow, that choice had been taken from him. He watched as the line of insect-things slowed to a stop and each one—and there were more of them than he had guessed—turned simultaneously to look at him with tiny saucer-shaped eyes, and they pronounced his name —Tom Winter—somehow inside his head, a voiceless chorus. He woke in a drenching sweat.


The TV was showing fuzz. He stood and switched it off. His watch said 3:45.

In the kitchen, the dishes were flawlessly clean.



He slept four more hours in his bedroom with the door closed, and in the morning he showered and phoned Doug Archer—the number on the back of his business card. "You wanted me to get in touch if I noticed anything strange."

"That's right ... is it getting weird out there?"

"Just a little weird. You could say that."

"Well, you called at the right time. I'm on vacation. The beeper gets switched off at noon. I was planning to drive up into the Cascades, but I can put it off a little while. How about if I drop by after lunch?"

"Good," Tom said, but he was troubled by the note of happy anticipation in Archer's voice.

If you talk about this, he thought, you're opening one more door that maybe ought to stay closed—taking one step closer to ratifying your own insanity.

But was silence any better? There were times (last night, for instance) when he felt himself stewing in the sour juice of his own isolation. No: he needed to talk about this, and he needed to talk about it to somebody who wasn't family— obviously not Tony or Loreen. Archer would do.

Dreams aside, nothing threatening had happened. Some inexpensive dinnerware had been surreptitiously cleaned: not quite Ghostbusters material. But it was the dream that stayed in his mind.

He told Archer he'd expect him soon and replaced the phone in its cradle. The silence of the morning house rang out around him. He walked to the kitchen door, opened it and took a tentative step outside.

The air was bracing; the sky was bright.

Tom had brought home a power mower from Sears on Wednesday but he hadn't used it yet; the grass was ankle high. He was briefly afraid to put his foot down off the back step—a vagrant image of metallic insects with brightly focused eyes ran through his mind. (They might be there still. They might bite.)

He took a breath and stepped down.

His ankles itched with anticipation . . . but there was nothing sinister among these weeds, only a few ants and aphids.

He walked to the northern quadrant of the yard where the dream-insects had moved between the house and the woods.

He understood that by looking for their trail he was violating the commonsense assumption that dreams are necessarily separate from the daylight world. But he was past fighting the impulse. Yet another prop kicked from under the edifice of his sanity. (Tom had begun to envision his sanity as one of those southern California hillside houses erected on stilts— the ones that wash into the ocean in a heavy rain.) He examined the deep, seeded grass where the insects had seemed to be, but there was nothing unusual among the dewy grass blades and feathered dandelion heads.

He should have been reassured. Instead, he felt oddly disappointed. Disappointed because on some fundamental level he was convinced last night's dream had been no ordinary dream. (No—but he couldn't say exactly how it was different.)

He walked to the verge of the woods. In his dream this was where the broad trail of bright-eyed insects had passed into the moon-shadow of the trees.

The sun, this time of morning, did not much penetrate the deep Pacific Northwest pinewoods. There was a trail leading back through this tangle, but it began at the opposite end of the yard. Here there were only these old trees and this fern-tangle undergrowth, the smell of rotting pine needles and the drip of hoarded rainwater. The barrier between the forest and the sunlit yard could not have been more distinct. He braced his hands on a tree trunk. Leaning forward, he felt the cool, mushroom dampness of the forest on his face.

He turned back to the house.

In his dream, the insects had moved to the forest from the house. Tom paced back to the nearest wall. It was an ordinary frame wall sided with cedar, well preserved—the paint hadn't blistered or peeled—but hardly unusual. This was the wall at the back of the master bedroom, windowless at this corner.

But if his dream had not been a dream, there must be some sort of opening here.

He sat on his haunches and pulled away handfuls of high, seeded grass from the concrete foundation where it rose some few inches above the soil.

He held his breath, gazing at what he found there.

The concrete was riddled with small, precisely round holes. The holes were all alike, all approximately as wide as the ball of his thumb.

His foot slipped in the wet grass and he sat back with a thump on his tailbone.

They must be bolt holes, he thought. Something must have been attached here. A deck, maybe.

But the holes in the chalky, water-stained concrete were smooth as glass.

"Be damned," he said.

He plucked a stem of the tall grass and held it to one of the openings.

Like shoving a stick into a hornet's nest, Tom. Real dumb. You don't know what might be in there.

But when he pushed the long grass stem inside there was no resistance ... no response.

He bent down and peered into the opening. He didn't put his cheek hard up against the concrete foundation, because he couldn't shake the belief that one of those tiny saucer-eyed creatures from his dream might be inside—that it might possess claws, teeth, a poison sac, a hostile intent. But he bent close enough to smell the rooty earth odor rising from the damp lawn . . . close enough to watch a sow bug trundling up the latticework of a thistle. No light radiated from the many holes in the foundation. He thought he felt a breath of air sigh out, oily and faintly metallic.

He stood up and backed off a pace.

What now? Do we call Exterminex? Dynamite the foundation?

Tell Archer?

No, Tom thought. None of the above. Not yet.



He explained everything else—the dishes, the dream—meticulously to Archer, who sat at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee and running his fingernail along the grain of the wood.

The telling of it made Tom feel foolish. Archer was sanity incarnate in his checkerboard cotton shirt and Levi's: rooted to the earth right through the soles of his high-top sneakers. Archer listened patiently, then grinned. "This has to be the most interesting thing to happen around here since Chuck Nixon saw a UFO over the waste treatment plant."

He would say that, Tom thought. Archer had been a legend at Sea View Elementary—"a world-class shit disturber," as the gym teacher had declared on one memorable occasion. Maybe that's why I called him, Tom thought: I still think of him as fearless.

"I mean it," Archer said. "You're obviously upset by this. But it's wonderful. I mean, here's this mundane little house in the woods, one more shitty frame house out along the Post Road—pardon me—then suddenly it's more than that. You know the quote from Kipling? 'There was a crack in his head and a little bit of the Dark World came through . .

Tom winced. "Thanks a lot." Kipling?

"Don't misunderstand. I would be disappointed," Archer said, "if you were crazy. Craziness is very common. Very—" He struggled for a word. "Very K-mart. I'm hoping for something a little classier."

"You're enjoying this too much."

"It's my hobby," Archer said.

Tom blinked. "It's what?"

"Well, it's hard to explain. The supernatural: it's like a hobby with me. I'm a skeptic, you understand. I don't believe in ghosts, I don't believe in UFOs. I'm not that kind of enthusiast. But I've read all the books. Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee. I don't believe in it, but I decided a long time ago that I wanted it to be true. I want there to be rains of frogs. I want statues to bleed. I want it because—please don't repeat this —it would be like God saying, 'F*ck Belltower, Washington, here's a miracle.' It would mean the asphalt down by the car lots might break out in crocuses and morning glories and tie up traffic for a week. It would mean we might all wake up one morning and find the pulp mill crumbled into sand. Half the town would be out of work, of course. But we could all live on manna and red wine. And nobody—absolutely nobody —would sell real estate."


Tom said, "When I was twelve years old I used to pray for nuclear war. Not so that millions of people would die. So that I wouldn't have to go to school in the morning."

"Exactly! Everything would be rubble. Life would be transformed."

"Life would be easier."

"More fun! Yes."

"Sure. But would it? I'm thirty years old, Doug. I don't pray for war anymore."

Archer met his gaze. "I'm thirty-two and I still pray for magic."

"Is that what we're talking about here?"

"Something extraordinary, anyhow. Unless you are crazy."

"It's a possibility," Tom said. "Crazy people see things sometimes. I had an aunt Emily who used to talk to Jesus. Jesus lived in the attic. Once in a while he'd move over to the bedroom and they'd have a chat while she combed her hair. Everybody in the family thought this was terrifically funny. Then one day Aunt Emily sliced open her wrists in a warm bath. Her landlord found her a week later. She left a note saying Jesus told her to do it."

Archer reflected on this a moment. "You're saying there are serious things at stake."

"Either way, it seems to me. My sanity. Or sanity in general."

"Screw sanity in general." "My own in particular, then."

"You want me to take this seriously," Archer said. "Okay. Fine. But I don't know you. You're somebody I sold a house to. Somebody who was a year behind me at Sea View Elementary. You seem like a fairly reasonable guy. But let's be clear, Tom. You called me because you want credentials for your sanity. I want more than that."

Tom leaned back in his chair, considering this. Obviously time had not much tamed Douglas Archer. Maybe it was important to remember you could pull a jail sentence and a stiff fine for throwing stones at Buicks, especially if you were old enough to know better. Tom had no love for Belltower, but neither did he especially want to see morning glories tying up traffic down by the car lots (though it would piss Tony off no end).

Still, there was something seductive about Archer's attitude, especially after a night of nervous hysteria. He said, "You know some of the old trails up through here?"

Archer nodded.

"Let's scout the territory behind the house." Tom stood up. "Then we'll talk about what to do."



They followed an old, nearly overgrown foot trail into the dense woods behind the back yard.

Tom had forgotten what it was like to walk through these big Pacific Northwest pinewoods, this density of moss and fern and dripping water. He followed the broad back of Archer's checkerboard shirt along the trail, bending under branches or stepping over small, glossy freshets of rainwater. The sound of cars passing on the Post Road faded as they climbed a gentle slope westward. All this talk of magic—his own and Archer's—seemed much more plausible here.

Archer said, "There were Indians living in through here a hundred years ago. Used to be an old totem pole in among the cedars, but they dragged that off to the town museum."

"Who uses this trail?"

"The Hopfner kids down the road, but they moved away a long time ago. Hikers sometimes. There are trails all the way up from the housing development along Poplar. It's mostly overgrown down by your place—I don't suppose anybody goes through that way these days."

He paused behind Archer where the trail banked away through an open meadow full of thistles and fireweed, past an old tin shack overgrown with ivy: someone's long-abandoned store of firewood, Tom guessed, the structure obscured and sagging moss-thick to the ground. Archer pushed ahead into the deeper forest and Tom followed until the tree shadows closed around him again.

They hiked for more than an hour, uphill through pine forest until they reached a rocky knoll. Archer clambered up the pinnacle, turned back and extended a hand to Tom. "We've come up a good height," he said, and Tom turned back and was surprised by a sweeping view not just to the Post Road but all the way to the coast—the town of Belltower clustered around the bay, the pulp mill lofting a gray plume of smoke.

"This is why people come up here," Archer said. "It's not a well-known trail. If we'd followed the other branch we would have ended up in some serious swamp. Up this way, it gets nice."

"Is there a name for this place?"

"Somebody must call it something. Everything's got a name, I guess."

"You come here a lot?"

"Once in a while. I come for the perspective. From here— on a nice day—everything looks good. The f*cking parking lots look good."

"You hate this town," Tom said.

Archer shrugged. "If I hated it, I'd leave. Though from what I've seen I doubt I could find anything significantly better. Hate is a strong word. But I dislike it a whole lot— sometimes." He paused and looked sidelong at Tom, shading his face against the sun. "I do admit to wondering what brought you back here."

"You never asked."

"It's not polite. Specially when someone obviously doesn't want to talk about it." He turned back to the view. The sunlight was intense. "So are we still being polite?"

"My wife left me," Tom said. "I lost my job. I was drinking for therapy."

Archer scrutinized him more closely now.

Tom said, "You're wondering whether an alcoholic can be trusted when he sees strange things at night. Fair enough. But it's been more than a month since I touched any kind of liquor. As an explanation, a good case of DTs would be almost comforting."

"How long were you drinking?"

"Seriously? Since the job fell through. Maybe three months."

Archer said, "I can think of a couple of tough questions." "Such as?"

"Lots of people lose their jobs. Lots of people go through divorce. They don't all jump down a bottle."

There were lots of ways to answer that. The most succinct would be, It's none of your business. But maybe he had made it Archer's business; he had raised the issue of his own stability. It wasn't a hostile question.

He could say, / was married for ten years to a bright, thoughtful woman whom I loved intensely, and whose mistrust grew until it was. like a knife between us.

He could explain about Barbara's political activism, her conviction that the world was teetering on the brink of ecological catastrophe. He could explain that his engineering work at Aerotech had divided them, tell Archer that she'd come to see him as a living example of the technological juggernaut: all his schooling and all his ingenuity plugged into a military-industrial machine so hydra-headed in its aspects and so single-minded in its goals that the earth itself was being strip-mined and forested into a global desert.

He could replay, perhaps, one of their arguments. He could reiterate his endless, patient assertion that the engines he designed were fuel-efficient; that his work, while not exactly a pursuit of the ecological Grail, might help clear the air around major cities. Band-Aid thinking, Barbara called this, a piddling solution to an overwhelming problem. A better combustion engine wouldn't restore the rain forests to Brazil or the redwoods to California. To which Tom would reply that it was a damn sight more productive than chaining himself to the gate of a paper mill or sneaking off with some long-haired anarchists to spike trees in the Cascades. At which point— more often in their last year—the conversation would decline into insult. Barbara would begin on his "complacent hick family," particularly Tony; and Tom, if he was drunk or angry enough, would explore the possible reasons for her recent loss of sexual appetite. ("It's not too complicated," she once told him. "Take a look in the mirror sometime.")


But there was no way to explain any of this. No way to explain his nagging suspicion that she was, after all, right; no way to explain the fundamental upwelling of love he still felt, even after their battles, when she was kneeling in the garden or brushing her hair before bed. He loved her with a loyalty that was animal in its mute persistence. He loved her even when he opened his mouth and called her frigid.

He blinked against the fierce blue sky, the curve of the distant bay.

He said, "I loved my wife a lot. I hated it when she left."

"So why'd she leave?" Archer added, "You're allowed to tell me to f*ck off at this point."

"It was a political disagreement. I was doing engineering for a little R and D company out of Seattle. Barbara was into the peace movement, among other things. She came home one day and told me the company was about to be handed a big federal grant for weapons research, something connected with SDI. I told her there was no truth to the rumor. The people I worked for were scrupulous, small-scale, community-minded—I knew these guys. I checked out the possibility, asked a few questions, came up totally blank. Stood my ground. Really, it was just one more argument. There'd been more than a few. But it turned out this was the last one. She couldn't bear the idea of being married to a war-economy engineer. As far as Barbara was concerned it was dirty money."

"That's what broke you up?"

"That and the fact that she was seeing somebody else." "Somebody in the movement," Archer guessed. "Somebody who was feeding her a line about government grants." Tom nodded.

"Pretty f*cking raw deal. So you started drinking—that's how you lost your job?"

"I started drinking later. I lost my job because the rumor turned out to be true. The company had been asked to bid on a satellite contract—a little bit of congressional pork for the Pacific Northwest. There was a lot of secrecy, a lot of paranoia about corporate espionage. It was all those questions I asked when I wanted to reassure Barbara. They figured I was a security risk."



Tom stood up and brushed the dirt off his jeans.

"Offhand," Archer said, "I would guess you're as sane as the next guy. A little bit bruised, maybe. Aside from what we've talked about, you hear voices?"

"Nope."

"Are you suicidal?"

"Three a.m. on a bad night—maybe. Otherwise no."

"Well, I'm no shrink. But it sounds like you're a long way < from crazy. I think we ought to check out what's been happening in that house you bought."

"Good," Tom said.

He shook hands with Archer and smiled at him, but a new and unwelcome thought had formed at the back of his mind: If I'm not insane, then maybe I ought to be scared.