Dead Lines

by Greg Bear

  He reached into his pocket and felt the smooth plastic phone—Trans, he corrected—and the roll of hundred-dollar bills.

  The donation.

  For a moment, he thought of just walking on and pocketing the money. Otherwise, what a waste. He could pay a lot of bills with ten grand, Helen’s bills in particular. Lindsey was starting school soon. She needed clothes. He would tell Joseph and Michelle that Sandaji’s people were lying, that he had given Baslan the money.

  But he had never stolen money in his life. Not since he had been a little boy, at any rate, lifting coins from his mother’s change bowl. And he was not a good liar. Perhaps for that reason, he had always hated liars and thieves.

  His feet again made soft cupping noises on the porch’s solid wood. He knocked.

  Baslan swiftly opened the door.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “Some better,” she said tersely. “She’s gone upstairs to rest.”

  “I asked her a question on behalf of Mr. Benoliel. I got an answer. That’s why I came here. No other reason. Anything like a personal reading was uncalled for. You do her research, no doubt. I resent you telling her about Daniella. I just wanted you to know.”

  He held out the roll of money. Baslan, her face coloring to a pale grape, took it with an instinctive dip of her hand. “I do not do research,” she snapped. “I told her nothing. Sandaji does not do readings or communicate with spirits. We don’t even know you, Mr. Russell.” She bobbed left to put the money aside. He heard the clinking of a jar or ceramic pot. “We are not charlatans. You can leave now.”

  With Baslan out of the doorway, Peter had a clear view through an arch to the dining room, about thirty feet from the porch. A little boy in a frilled shirt and knee stockings stood there. He looked sick; not sick, dead; worse than dead, unreal, unraveling. His face turned in Peter’s direction, skin as pale and cold as skim milk. The head seemed jointed like a doll’s. The grayish eyes saw right through him, and suddenly the outline blurred, precisely as if the boy had fallen out of focus in a camera viewfinder.

  Peter’s eyes burned.

  Baslan straightened. She gripped the edge of the door and asked sharply, “Do you need a receipt?”

  Peter’s neck hair was bristling. He shook his head and removed his glasses as if to clean them.

  “Then good night.”

  When he did not move, Baslan looked on with agitated concern and added, “We’re done, aren’t we?” She prepared to close the door. Her motion again revealed the arch and the dining room. The boy was no longer visible. He couldn’t have moved out of the way, not without being seen.

  He simply wasn’t there. Perhaps he had never been there at all.

  Baslan closed the door in Peter’s face with a solid clunk.

  Peter stood on the porch, dazed, face hot, like a kid reacting to an unkind trick. He slowly forced his fists to open. “This is crap,” he murmured, replacing his glasses. He had not wanted to come here in the first place. He walked quickly down the steps and along the winding stone path between the bamboo to the gate. The scuff of his shoes echoed from the stone wall to his left. The gate whirred open, expelling him from the house, the grounds: an unwanted disturber of the peace.

  On the street, he wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, then opened the car door and sat. He started the car, listening to the soothing, familiar whine, and tried to recall the answer Sandaji had given to Joseph’s question; despite everything, it remained clear in his head. He repeated her words several times, committing them to memory before putting the Porsche in gear.

  Slowly his breath returned and the muscle binding in his chest smoothed. The back of his eyes still felt tropical, however, as if they were discharging a moist heat into his skull.

  They were charlatans after all. Why go through that awful charade in the back room, then trot out a little boy in a Buster Brown outfit? Both had been stunts to gull the shills, trick the unwary into asking more questions, paying more money. That was as reasonable an explanation as any.

  PETER WAS HAPPY to leave Pasadena. His thick, powerful hands clasped the wheel so tightly that he had to flex his fingers. “Ah, Christ!” he shouted in disgust once again at all things New Age and mystical. There was life and this Earth and all the sensual pleasures you could reasonably grab, and then there was nothing. Live and get out of it what you could. Leave the rest alone. That other sort of madness could kill you.

  Then why did I reach out for Phil?

  Driving alone, his work done, the traffic on the 210 blessedly easy for this time of night, going back to his home in the hills, he pictured Phil’s rueful, ingratiating smile. On the highway, his tears flowed. His shoulders shook.

  And a pretty little girl in a blue sweater, pink shorts, and a tank top. Don’t forget her. Ever.

  The loss and the old, much-hated self-pity just piled up and spilled. It was all he could do not to break into a mourning howl.

  All he could do, almost, not to spin the wheel and drive right off the freeway.

  CHAPTER 4

  PETER ROLLED OVER in the tangled sheets and opened his eyes to an out-of-focus bedscape. He blinked at a blur of satin trim coming loose from his brown wool blanket, then rubbed his eyes and closely observed another blur spotted with white: a rumpled pillow leaking feathers through its seams. He was still half asleep.

  His hand fumbled on the bed stand for his glasses.

  A shaft of sun fell across one corner of the room from the skylight, reflected from the full-length mirror, and beamed over the space beside his bed. He made out dust motes in the beam. The motes danced with a puff of his breath.

  Nice to just sink, let sleep win. His head fell back onto the pillow.

  Eyes closed. Delicious blankness.

  Birds sang in the backyard.

  He opened his eyes again, arm twitching. The beam had shifted and the dust motes were swirling like spoiled cream in coffee. As he watched, bleary, they took a sort of elongated shape. He thought he could make out two legs and an arm. Small. The arm lengthened, adding a hand-shaped eddy. A face was about to form when he opened his eyes wide and said, bemused, “All right. I’m waking up now.” He leaned over and waved his arms through the sunbeam. The motes dissipated wildly.

  His jaw hurt. He was a mess and he stank. He got out of bed and straightened, hooking a temple piece around one ear.

  The night had been disjointed, filled with scattered flakes of dream, memories drawn up from a deep sea like fish in a net. The dreams had all possessed a jagged, surreal quality, as if scripted by restless demons, pent up for too long.

  “Art, sperm, and sanity don’t keep,” Peter said to the face in the mirror.

  He thought about that for a moment, then padded into the bathroom to turn the hot-water tap for a shower. The old white tile in the stall was cracked and creased with mildew. The room smelled of moisture. It was a good thing the air up in the hills was dry or the floor would have rotted out a long time ago.

  As he dressed, his clothes became a kind of armor, like blankets wrapped tight around a child’s eyes. The waking world was filled with traps designed to make him feel bad and he did not want to feel bad anymore.

  He stepped into old slippers and shuffled into the kitchen to make coffee in a French press, the only way he liked it. As he pushed the red plastic plunger down through the grounds, a bell-like tone came from the living room, not his house phone and certainly not his cell phone, both of which sounded like amorous insects. He finished the plunger push and went to look. Big throw pillows in Persian patterns covered an old beige couch. Two graceful sixties chairs made of parabolas of steel wire and slung with purple canvas supported massive green pillows, like alien hands offering mints. The big front window looked out over a garden left to itself the last nine months, and doing fairly well without Peter’s attention. Jasmine and honeysuckle vied with Helen’s old rosebushes to scent the air, and the splashes of red and yellow and pink in the late-morning sun were cheerful enough.
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  The bell toned again. He peered back through the now-contrasty and dark spaces of the living room. Then he remembered. He had left the box of Trans on the table by the French doors. He had also carried one with him into Sandaji’s house in Pasadena.

  He opened the door, stepped out across the brick pavers to the upright oil drum closet, and fished out his coat. The unit was still in the coat pocket. He opened it and the display lit up at his touch.

  “Hello?” he said into the tiny grill.

  “Peter, it’s Michelle. Seven rings. Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Just getting cleaned up.”

  “Good. Weinstein left a map. It led me to ten more phones in a box hidden behind the couch. Is that cute, or what?”

  “Pretty cute,” Peter said.

  “So I have fourteen phones now. I was trying to remember which one you put in your pocket. Did I dial the right number?”

  “You probably didn’t dial anything,” Peter said, looking at the circle of shaded graphic lozenges on the touch screen, numbered from zero to twelve.

  “Yeah, right. Smartass. Well, I’m standing outside the house, on the drive. It seems to work out here.”

  “Great,” Peter said, longing for coffee.

  “Joseph’s curious to hear what that woman told you.”

  “I could come over now,” Peter said, hoping his sincerity sounded thin.

  “He’s taking hydrotherapy. How about noon? He’ll be ready by then and relaxed, and besides, you know that noon is the best time of his day.”

  “I’ll be there,” Peter said, and stifled a small urge to say, I’s a-comin’, with bells on.

  “Are you glad to hear the phone works?”

  “Trans,” Peter corrected. “Delighted. I’ll tell what’s-his-name.”

  “Weinstein. No, I’ll tell him, once I convince Joseph. And I’ll tell him you convinced me.”

  Peter was picking the other units out of their box, just to give his hands something to do. Each was a different color: opalescent black, dark blue, red, a trendy metallic auburn, and the one he held, dark metallic green. They looked like props in a science fiction film. Something from the parts catalog in This Island Earth.

  “It’s our little conspiracy,” Michelle said. “Besides, it won’t hurt you or me to help Joseph make another pot of money.”

  What few telecom stocks Peter had owned had gone south long ago, leaving his retirement scheme in a shambles. “Never mind,” Peter said. “I’ll talk to Weinstein when the time comes.”

  “If you insist. Noon, then. How do you end a call with this thing?”

  “Shut the cover,” Peter suggested.

  “Right.”

  A click, then silence. Peter pulled the unit away, then raised it to his ear again. The quiet in the room seemed to deepen. He tried the other ear. Same thing.

  Actually, he was impressed. He had never heard voices so clearly on a phone. Michelle could have been right there in the house.

  Maybe Weinstein was on the up-and-up.

  * * *

  AS HE DRANK coffee and ate a bowl of Trix, Peter opened up the green Trans on the counter and punched the single button marked “Help” below the circle of numbers.

  Welcome to Trans, the display said. The message scrolled across, then shrank to fill the touch screen, with arrows pointing left and right at the bottom.

  Trans has voice recognition. Ask a simple question or say a key word.

  “Dial,” Peter said in a monotone. He had worked with computers enough to know the drill: Talk like a robot and the unit might understand.

  Would you like to dial a number?

  “How do I dial?” Peter asked.

  Trans works with a base-12 number system: 10, 11, and 12 are treated as integers. Every Trans unit has an individual identification number seven integers long. There are no area codes or country codes. To communicate with another user, dial the ID number of the unit you wish to connect to. Remember, a hyphen before 10, 11, or 12 means you should push one of those buttons rather than entering the component numbers (1 or 0 or 2) on separate buttons. Trans is base-12!

  Peter made a hmph face and wondered if anyone other than computer geeks would ever catch on to that. “What’s my number?” he asked.

  The number of your Trans unit is -10-1-0-7-12-3-4. Your unit has been used once to receive one call. You have not yet made any outgoing calls. Please use Trans as often as you wish to place a call anywhere on Earth. Don’t be shy! There are no extra charges with Trans.

  “My own personal Interociter,” Peter murmured, lifting the unit and looking at it from above and below. There were no holes for a recharging plug or an earphone. Except for the top of the case, the unit was seamless.

  The Soleri bells gonged loudly outside the front door. Still in his robe, Peter marched across the slate floor to the door and peeked through a clear section of glass. Hank Wuorinos—thirty-one, buff, his close-cut gelled hair standing up like a patch of bleached Astroturf—stood on the patio. He reached out one tattooed hand to play with a drooping branch of jasmine. Peter undid the locks and opened the doors.

  “Hey!” Wuorinos greeted. “I’m on a flick, a Jack Bishop film. I’m off to Prague. Wish me luck.”

  “Congratulations,” Peter said, and stood back to let him in. Hank had gotten a start as a teenager handling lighting for some of Peter’s more decorous and ornate model shoots. The girls had nicknamed him Worny, which he had hated but tolerated, from them. Now he was a full-bore professional, IATSE card and all.

  “Got some coffee?” Hank asked.

  “Half a cup. I can make more.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers.” Hank followed Peter into the kitchen. He poured himself what was left from the French press and filled it to the brim with milk, then slugged most of it down with one gulp. “I’ve never been to Europe. Any advice?”

  “I’ve never been to Prague,” Peter said.

  “I hear it’s fatal sensuous. Beautiful women eager to get the hell out of Eastern Europe.”

  “Look out for yourself,” Peter advised with some envy.

  Hank waggled his extended pinky and thumb. “No worse than your average day at Peter Russell’s house.”

  “Did Lydia tell you about Phil?”

  Hank’s smile faded. “No . . . what?”

  “He died yesterday.”

  Hank was too young to know what to say, to feel, or to actually believe. “Jesus. How?”

  “Heart attack or stroke.”

  Death was new to Hank. He tried to find something appropriate, some sentiment, and his face worked through a range of trial emotions for several seconds. “You going to the funeral?”

  “I haven’t heard about a funeral yet,” Peter said.

  “Lydia will want one,” Hank said with assurance. “Or at least a wake. But I’m leaving tomorrow. I won’t be able to come . . . I could . . .”

  Phil had introduced Peter and Hank. Hank had stayed with Phil and Lydia for a few weeks as a teenager. It had been a seminal moment for Hank Wuorinos, young runaway from Ames, Iowa. Lydia had probably shoplifted Hank’s virginity. Phil had never much held it against Hank. Lydia was what she was. A real Hollywood career, after such an introduction to Los Angeles, was a sign of persistence and genuine talent.

  “Go to work,” Peter said. “Phil would understand.”

  “Besides, I couldn’t face Lydia,” Hank said.

  “She’d want you to stay over and console her,” Peter said.

  “Shit,” Hank said, crestfallen. “She would. You know she would.”

  Peter held up the cardboard box. “You’ll need one of these to keep in touch,” he said. “Take your pick.”

  Hank peered. “What are they, Japanese Easter eggs?”

  “They’re called Trans. They’re like cell phones but they’re free. You’ll love them. They use a base-12 number system.”

  “Wow! They actually work?”

  “I just took a call on one.”

  Hank pi
cked the red unit and twisted it with delight in his hands. Hank’s dark emotions were wonderfully transient. He had a job, he was about to see the world, and that easily trumped the death of poor, hapless Phil.

  “No long-distance charges?”

  “Not so far. They’re demos.”

  “Let’s try.”

  Peter indulged him. Just being around Hank cheered him. Peter showed him the help button and they took down the numbers of all the phones on two pieces of paper. Then they tried calling the different units from various rooms in the house, like boys with cans on strings. The sound was crystal clear. Hank was thrilled.

  “They are so cool,” he said. “They’re like Interociters.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Peter said.

  “How many can I have?”

  Peter overcame an odd twinge of greed. “Take two,” he said. “One for your girlfriend.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend,” Hank said seriously, “but I will find one in Prague. I’ve been reading Kafka just to get in the mood. The tourist brochures say Prague is supposed to be the most haunted city in Europe. City of ghosts. A church made of bones. That’s what the DP told me. Who ya gonna call?” The dark emotions returned and Hank picked up his cup of coffee in a toast. “To Phil. Is this what it’s like to get old, your friends start dying?”

  “Something like that,” Peter said.

  AFTER HANK LEFT, Peter checked his answering machine in the kitchen. A red 1 flashed on the display. He rolled back the tape—it was a very old unit, he seldom bought new appliances—and listened.

  It was Lydia. She had a voice like the young Joanne Woodward, honey and silk and baby’s breath. She told him she was already in Marin—she had taken the train—and she had finalized arrangements. She said she would be at Phil’s house and gave his address and phone number. The wake would be late tomorrow. “No funeral. Phil wanted to be cremated. Just a few friends, mostly from the time we were married.”