“Next time steal a car with GPS, a-hole,” Chick said. Talking to himself, he’d managed to stay awake and drive all night. So he kept talking to himself, now through the blinding day, along the endless road stretching out to a vanishing point lost in the silver shimmer of a mirage at the smeared horizon.
The engine missed, the Jeep lurched, the gas needle below empty now. Chick swore, just as he had when Fat Ernie had slashed the knife down his side, ruined his new jacket, his best shirt. His eyes moved to the rear-view mirror. Still nothing. His gaze shifted back, ahead.
That’s when he saw it. Something in the middle of nothing, nowhere. A weathered wooden sign stuck in roadside scrub and gravel. Sand-scoured letters spelling out:
last chance
gas
food
things in jars
Just beyond, a ramshackle old shed of a building with a faded Coca-Cola sign on the side, a single gas pump out front.
Of course he pulled in, coasted in more like it. The Jeep dying just as he reached the pump. His luck was holding.
Chick got out, squinting in the glare of the desert day, legs stiff, side of his chest prickly with dried blood. He checked under the dirty blue windbreaker he’d lifted from the first car he’d stolen. The long cut had scabbed over. No big deal.
“Yo!” he shouted. “A little service!” His voice didn’t even echo, the air was that still. All he heard was something creaking. Gentle. A slow creak, silence, another creak. It was coming from around the side. He pictured some old geezer in a rocking chair. That’d be about right for a dump like this. He started for the side of the shed, then remembered.
He turned back to the Jeep. No sense lugging the gym bag around, calling too much attention to it. So he took it off the passenger seat, pushed it deeper under the dash, locked the doors, laughing at himself because probably the only living soul within fifty miles was the old geezer in the creaky rocking chair and he was round the corner.
But it wasn’t a rocking chair. It was another sign. This one hanging from a metal rod off a post. For a moment, Chick didn’t register whatever it was the sign said because of what he saw behind it, twenty feet farther on.
A big old tent. Striped red and white, or used to be before the sun got at it. Like the circus had come to town about a hundred years ago and never left. How’d he miss seeing something that size from the road?
Creak.
The sign was swinging, slow and gentle. Chick didn’t even register that there was no breeze. He was too distracted by what this sign said.
things in jars
admission 25¢
Twenty-five cents? Nothing cost twenty-five cents these days. He looked at the tent. It had an entrance, though whatever was on the inside was lost in black shadow.
He glanced back over his shoulder to—
He jumped, choked, breath held.
“Heard ya callin’,” the attendant said, standing right behind Chick. He wore oil-stained overalls, the name Harry embroidered on the filthy oval nametag. He wiped his hands on an oil-slicked rag. He squinted and his face creased up in deep furrows like parched land and made Chick think he was as old as the tent.
“Make some noise would ya, a-hole.” Chick hadn’t heard his approach.
The attendant, Harry, ignored the comment. “Need some gas, huh?”
“Whaddya think?” The guy was an idiot.
“Water, too?”
Chick stared at him. “It’s the desert.”
“Take a while.”
“To fill a gas tank?”
The attendant didn’t seem to notice that Chick’s responses were coming shriller and sharper, too much like a man in a hurry, trying to outrace panic. Which he was.
“Gotta start the pump,” Harry said. “Get it primed. Don’t get a lot of call to use it so I keep it shut off.” His face contorted in what Chick thought was supposed to be a grin. “Good for the environment.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever, man. Just do it fast.”
The attendant nodded sagely, as if Chick had made a wise, out-of-the-box suggestion. He wiped his hands again. Chick noticed a reddish tinge to the stains. Had a sudden doubt that it was oil.
“Feel free,” Harry said. He gave a nod, looked past Chick.
Chick knew he meant the tent.
“What’s in there?”
“What the sign says.”
Chick glanced back to the dark entrance. It did look cool. Shady. Relief and respite from the sun. “Well, what kinda—” But he didn’t finish the question because the attendant was already rounding the corner of the shed, out of earshot, then out of sight.
As enticing as the promise of shade was, Chick took off after Harry. His future was under the dash in the front passenger side and he wasn’t about to risk it.
The attendant was starting up some kind of machinery in the shed and Chick heard the muffled grind of a pump rev into life, smelled the acrid stench of diesel fuel. Harry had him pop the hood so he could get at the radiator, used the rag to twist off the cap, then stepped back with no great hurry as scalding water geysered and sputtering vapor spewed. “Take a while,” the attendant said once more. “Gotta let it cool.” He took a long time to say that last word.
Chick swore as he locked the Jeep again. He hated the desert. Hated the sun. Hated being stuck here waiting on a doddering old fart. He thought of the shade.
He made his way back to the tent. Stood at the entrance, smelled the difference in the air that issued from its dark depths. Inside was cool, not musty. Surprising. The scent of whatever the tent held was somehow electric, plastic, in the way new electronics smelled coming out of their packaging. He took another breath, inhaled deeply, trying to puzzle out why the scent seemed so familiar. He stepped inside.
Not as dark as he’d thought. Out of the glare of the sun, the impenetrable shadows of the tent’s interior were lightened by daylight glowing through the canvas.
And everywhere, there were jars.
Sweeping toward him, towering over him, a frozen tidal wave of glass. Large jars, small jars. Jars stacked on shelves and tables and each other. Some were clear, some were dark, some had ordinary twist-off metal caps, others were held in wooden crates or cages or rope or chains and sealed with wax or padlocks and one huge one held sideways in a vise clamped to an antique metal bracket.
He saw a bell jar upended on a plank of wood, covering a square of what looked like toffee with a bite mark taken out of one side, a child’s tooth embedded in the other.
Chuck didn’t get it.
He looked at another jar. Floating inside, a knotted ball of two-headed snakes. In another, a baby’s finger. In another, a milky liquid that maybe had something moving in it.
“No way.” Chick’s voice sounded like a whisper in a room cloaked with heavy curtains, swallowed instantly. The silence was physical.
He shook off his unease and moved on to another row of jars. Saw an old baseball card on a stand in one jar, but didn’t recognize the player or his uniform. Another had maybe something like stewed tomatoes, all red and wet and wrinkled? Pig knuckles in another? A spider’s web. A dried heart. Another empty except for what looked like tiny handprints pressed on the glass from the inside.
“Okay. This is stupid.”
He turned to leave, but the entrance wasn’t where he thought it was, only more shelves, more tables.
More jars.
“Hey!” he shouted. But his voice went nowhere.
He spun around, tried to get his bearings, and failed because the tent seemed larger than he’d expected, a lot larger on the inside than the outside.
“Got to be two tents.”
He walked ahead, turned a corner, stopped to find a jar crammed with floating eyeballs, and all of them staring at him.
“Stop it,” he muttered.
He t
urned another corner, looked for scuffmarks in the dirt floor, anything that might point a way to an exit.
And then he saw it.
A hole in the canvas high overhead had let in one long, dust-filled spike of sunlight and it shone down on one jar among the multitude, sparkling off the curved glass and making the object inside gleam with a pure blue metallic gloss like molten desert sky.
Chick didn’t want to be distracted. He wanted his Jeep filled with gas and water and one hundred grand of untraceable cash and he wanted out of here and on with his life. But it was a very unusual blue, deeply compelling in its way, so a moment or two longer in here wouldn’t really matter.
He went closer to the jar, bent down to get a better look at what was inside.
Something the size and shape of the kind of hefty pens Fat Ernie always used to write his coded entries in his notebook. A Montcalm or Cross or something fancy like that. But there was a subtle indentation along one side that made Chick’s fingers twitch as if they had to hold it. And that color. The sculptural balance of the pen itself. It looked for all the world as if someone had conceived of and then made the perfect object to be held in a human hand in order to… to what? Chick couldn’t tell. The object was standing up on one end, leaning against the inside of the glass jar, and the bottom tip where he’d expect to see a nib was obscured by something thick and dark and crusted. For a moment, he thought of the scabbed-over knife wound striping his ribs. Dried blood? What would dried blood be doing on something like that?
“Good question,” the attendant whispered in his ear.
Chick jumped the proverbial mile, spun around. Harry stood ten feet away, far out of whisper range.
“Screw you old man, you scared me!”
The attendant shrugged it off, nodded at the jar. “You like it.”
Chick’s heart was thundering. He felt his hands tremble and he folded his arms to still them. “What is it?”
“Take it out.”
Chick looked back at the jar, at the object inside. For a moment, he felt as if all the other jars in the tent were empty, that only this jar held something. He wanted it.
“Go ahead,” the attendant said. “It’s calling you.”
Chick didn’t bother asking what the crazy coot meant by that, just picked up the jar. The object clattered inside as it shifted around. A series of glowing white dots lit up on one side, then faded. He put his hand on the twist-off cap, hesitated.
“Seriously, what is it?”
“It’ll tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
The attendant took a moment to look around at all the jars, almost as if he was counting them. “Every jar has a story.” He looked back at Chick. “This one’s yours.”
Chick was tired of the geezer. He twisted off the cap, pulled out the object, and just as he had suspected, it was perfectly balanced.
“I know this. It was Andrugene’s.”
Even as he said the words, Chick had no idea who Andrugene was, and then he did. “The rock star.” He paused a moment as the details came to him. “What a schmuck. The guy had everything, and then…”
“Go on,” the attendant murmured.
And as if he were there, Chick remembered—
* * *
—the doctor’s office. Not like any Chick had seen. Everything was new and crisp and expensive, as if it was made tomorrow, not today. And Andrugene was there. Tall, slim, head shaved, diamond earring, tattoos everywhere, peace, love, respect, the cheering crowds, the women, the men, the private jet, the parties, the most Grammies, the biggest sales, everything— Andrugene’s life engulfing Chick as if he were living it not just observing. As if he were Andrugene.
The doctor, subdued and respectful, looked at the MRI images on the desktop screen she had angled for him. Slice after slice of the brain that had given birth to so many songs, created such beauty, and such wealth. “As we feared,” she said.
Andrugene could barely say the word, but knew he had to. “Inoperable.”
The word hung there in the silence. But the doctor drew herself up, unwilling to let it stay there alone. “Today,” she said. “Today. But microsurgery techniques are constantly improving. The instruments become smaller, the targeting more precise…”
“When?” the superstar asked.
The doctor was reluctant to go on the record. She adjusted her glasses. “Five years? Ten? It is difficult to say with certainty.”
“Not for me,” Andrugene said. He was twenty-six and already worth billions. And yet a handful of cells in his skull was threatening to take it all away. “How much time do I have?”
The doctor glanced at the MRIs again. “Six months.” Then she met his eyes directly. “But you understand, you could have more.”
Andrugene understood. “Let’s do it.”
* * *
“I don’t understand,” Chick said. He stared at the blue metal object in his hand.
“Sure you do,” Harry said. But where Harry was now, Chick couldn’t be sure. Somewhere off to the side, behind a wall of jars? Chick turned to see if—
* * *
Andrugene lay on the yielding plastic surface of the cooling platform. The needles in his arms still stung, and he could hear the whirr of the heart-lung machine as it siphoned his blood, drew heat from it, one carefully calibrated degree at a time, mixed it with the doctor’s potions, and pumped it back.
The light in the prep room was low and amber, like sunlight filtered through old canvas. The doctor a wraith in white, hair and face swathed, moving silently, checking, rechecking, then standing at his side.
“I’m cold…,” Andrugene breathed. His voice sounded distant even to himself.
“You’ll get colder.” The doctor seemed sad, though he couldn’t see her face, only dark eyes behind glasses behind the plastic visor, already receding behind reflection after shimmering reflection. “But not for long.”
Andrugene sighed as the prep room began to fade, swirls of darkness rising from the edges of his vision as if a spotlight on his stage were blinding him with a single point of—
He gasped when an even brighter light flared so intensely that he tried to turn away but his muscles burned as if they were being gouged from his body with a knife.
* * *
In the tent, Chick stumbled back, sputtering with pain. “What the f—”
“Shh,” the attendant said as he clamped his oil-slicked hand around Chick’s. “You don’t want to drop it.”
Chick looked down at Harry’s hand, wrapping his, holding the object. So blue, so—
* * *
“Is that better?” the doctor asked.
At least, Andrugene assumed his questioner was a doctor. Difficult to be sure because his vision was still washed out by the bright light, growing dimmer now, thankfully, though his eyes still throbbed as if he’d been in the dark too long. His arms ached, too. And his legs. He tried to shake his head, to shake himself awake, but couldn’t.
“Is something wrong?”
“Can’t move,” Andrugene said. Even his throat hurt.
“Just restraints. Coming out of suspension, movements can be awkward, erratic. Can’t let you hurt yourself.”
“Coming out…” Andrugene smiled despite the pain. “Then the tumor…?”
“I don’t know about that,” the doctor said. Andrugene saw him move to a white wall and begin to sit down. For a moment, there was no chair, and then one seemed to balloon from the wall to meet him. It was so fast, and so odd, that Andrugene wasn’t certain that he’d actually seen it.
“But I’ve had the procedure, right? That’s why you woke me up?”
“Ah,” the doctor said. He looked at his forearm, brushed his finger through the air. Something glowed up at him. “This is your first time.”
“I don’t understand.”
Andrugene struggled, managed to move enough that he felt the sting of needles in his arms. He was still hooked up to equipment, plastic tubes filled with who-knew-what snaking over the edge of the bed. That’s why he was restrained. That made sense. He settled back. “Ask away.” He had time to spare now.
“Good, good.” The doctor made motions over his forearm again and light flickered up from something Andrugene couldn’t see. Probably an iPad or phone or something. “I’m interested in the recording industry’s reaction to President Ortega’s crackdown on stimloads.”
“Say what?” The doctor’s words had been garbled.
“Illegal stimloads.”
“What’s a… stimload?”
The doctor looked away from his forearm. “Understandable. Sometimes memory can be affected by revival. We can start slow. Go back. Say to… when Ortega was elected for his first term.”
“You mean Obama. President Obama.”
“No, no. That’s fifty years too…” The doctor stopped, checked his forearm again. “Oh for… When you were suspended, Obama was president?”
“Right. Who’s Ortega?”
The doctor stood and the chair slurped back into the wall and Andrugene could see that his questioner had no iPad or phone— it was the skin of his forearm that glowed like a computer screen.
“I’m terribly sorry,” the doctor said. “There’ll be a technician here soon.” He walked toward another wall and a door was suddenly there, opened, and closed behind him.
“Wait!” Andrugene cried out, then coughed because his throat burned. “I need to—” Something cold flooded up through his arms and took his breath away and the light in the strange room dimmed and darkened into a single vanishing point and—
Expiration Date Page 28
