Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  Joey Webb blinked at her. “They were here once, you said.”

  Perhaps he was lucid now. “Can you sense them, either of them? Can you sense their father?”

  “Me sense a person?” Joey said, his voice unfortunately taking on his skitzy singsong tone again, “Aimee Semple McPherson swam out to sea here, and everybody thought she drowned. Two divers did drown, trying to save her, and she had to carry those ghosts forever, after that.”

  deLarava had wanted Joey Webb to sift news of old Apie Sullivan’s ghost from the turbulent psychic breezes, but he appeared to be hung up on Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist who had disappeared in the surf off Ocean Park in 1926; it had been big news at the time, but later the newspapers had discovered that she had just ducked away to spend a couple of weeks in anonymous seclusion with an electrician from her gospel radio station.

  deLarava sighed. Even as a film shoot, today’s expedition had pretty much been a failure. The generator truck from the Teamster’s Union had got stuck in the sand a couple of hundred feet short of the fish, so that cables had had to be run where people were sure to trip over them, and then there had been trouble with the Mole-phase lights, the tic-tac-toe squares of nine 5600-Kelvin lamps that were supposed to provide daylight-colored illumination to fill the shadows on people’s faces; the lights had alternately flared and faded, and finally deLarava had told the cameraman to just shoot the bystanders with their eye sockets and cheek hollows gaping like caverns. God knew what the fish would come out looking like on the film.

  Hours ago Animal Control had sent a truck out to haul away the fish, but a bystander claimed that the dead monster was a coelacanth, some sort of living fossil from the Carboniferous Age, uncommon anywhere and never found in the Pacific Ocean. The Department of Fish and Game had arrived after that, and some professors had driven down from UCLA and were still arguing with anyone who planned to even touch the damned thing.

  The news story, such as it was, was in the can, and deLarava had sent one of her people back to the studio with it, but she didn’t want to leave the beach without learning whether old Sullivan’s ghost had emerged from the sea yet—and if so, where he was. She wouldn’t dare try to eat him until Saturday, but she could safely catch him in a jar now.

  For what must have been the hundredth time, she glanced at her watch, but the compass needle was still jittering unreliably, pointing more or less at the concrete block of handball courts, which was north of her. Before the camera had started rolling she had stumped her way through the crowd around the site, peering constantly at her watch, but each of the six times the needle had pointed away from north it had been indicating some nearby grinning or frowning old lunatic in junk-store clothes—accreted, hardened old ghosts, whose stunted fields wouldn’t even be detectable if they’d step back a yard or two.

  Apie Sullivan’s ghost would be indistinguishable from a death-new one, and strong, preserved for all these past thirty-three years in the grounded stasis of the sea. But tracking a new ghost, she thought now as she watched the quivering needle, is like trying to spot a helicopter in a city—you “hear” ’em from all kinds of false directions; they aren’t truly at any “where” yet, and they’re subject to “echoes.”

  But I’m not even getting any echoes. And Joey Webb isn’t sensing him, and he would—Joey thinks they’re angels or spirits or something, but he does reliably sense ghosts. Joey would know it if he was here.

  And he’s not here.

  deLarava dug in her purse and pulled out her wallet. “Joey,” she said, “are you listening to me? I want you to stay here, rent a room at a motel or something, can you do that?” She slid a sheaf of twenties and hundreds out of the wallet and held it out toward him.

  “Which motel?” said old Joey alertly, taking the money. “What name will he be using?”

  “He’s not going to stay at a motel, you—” She threw her cigarette away toward the waves, and coughed harshly, tasting clove in the back of her throat. “He’ll be just a little wispy shred, like the cellophane from a cigarette pack, but not reflecting. Track him with a compass—he’ll be dazed, wandering. Buy a jar of orange marmalade, dump out the marmalade but leave some smears in it for him to smell, and if you find him, catch him in it.” She stared at the crazy old man anxiously. “Can you do all this?”

  “Oh, do it, sure,” he said with a careless wave. He shoved the bills inside his shirt. “What do you want me to tell him?”

  “Don’t talk to him,” deLarava wailed, nearly crying with exhaustion and frustration. “Don’t unscrew the lid after you’ve caught him. Just wrap him in your coat or something and call me, okay?”

  “Okay, okay. Sheesh.”

  “You won’t let him get past you? He mustn’t get inland of Pacific Avenue, I can’t afford to lose him in the maze of the city.”

  Joey stood up straight and squinted at her. “He shall not pass.”

  This would have to do. “Call me when you’re checked in,” she said clearly, then turned and began striding heavily up the sand slope, shoving her way between the bystanders.

  When she had elbowed her way to the clearing in the center of the crowd, she paused by the thigh-high hulk of the coppery fish and looked down into its big, dulled eye. A living fossil, one of the UCLA professors had called this monstrosity. Hardly a living one, she thought. Though some of us still are.

  She was on the north side of the dead thing, and she looked at her watch—but the compass needle pointed away behind her, northward.

  She sighed and began pushing her way back out of the crowd. This was a waste of time, she thought. But maybe my billboards will have elicited a call about the Parganas kid. And I parked the Lexus way up on Main here—maybe somebody will have broken into it.

  Sweat had run down from Canov’s styled hair into his beard, and he scratched at it before it could work down his neck to his white collar. He was glad to see that deLarava was finally leaving, for a dozen children in swimsuits had climbed up onto the open-air stage that he’d chosen as a lookout post, and they’d started some skipping and singing game.

  A big dead fish, Canov thought as he carefully stepped down the cement block stairs to the pavement. What can I tell Obstadt, besides that she hung around and looked at it and filmed it? This one’s bigger than the ones she hooks and hauls up to the Queen Mary deck on dark nights, but she didn’t catch this one, and she surely didn’t eat it. Maybe she’s just interested in fish. And the crabs and lobsters have all been picked up, or managed to return to the sea. I can’t even bring him one, not that Obstadt would have any use for it, being a strict vegetarian.

  “Can I buy a smoke off you, man?”

  Canov turned away from the beach. A tanned young man who had been standing over by the volleyball nets had walked across the gray pavement to the stage, and now stood with one hand extended and the other digging in the pocket of his cutoff jeans. Canov thought he looked too healthy to be wanting nicotine.

  “I haven’t found any,” said Canov. If it was a cigarette the man wanted, this answer ought to disconcert him.

  But instead of protesting that he didn’t want a cigarette picked up off the sidewalk, the young man shook his head ruefully. “They’re out today, though, aren’t they?” he said, his voice just loud enough for Canov to hear it over the rap music shouting out of the black portable stereos on the sidelines of the volleyball games. “You can almost smell how they died.”

  Canov, never a user of the stuff known as “smokes” and “cigars,” just shrugged. “I can smell that that fish died,” he said inanely.

  The young man glanced disinterestedly down toward the crowd by the shore. “Dead fish, yeah. Well, see you.” And he began jogging away barefoot toward the bike path, doubtless searching for some other out-of-place-looking person standing around.

  Police had cleared another path through the crowd, and now a pickup truck with a cherry-picker crane in its bed had been driven down onto the sand, and Canov could see men in overalls t
rying to roll the fish over onto a long board. A big flatbed tow truck was parked nearby, and he wondered idly who had won custody of the creature.

  He sighed and began walking over. Obstadt would probably want to know.

  The fish was to be driven to an oceanography lab at UCLA. When the creature had been covered with a tarpaulin and roped down on the long bed of the tow truck, the driver slowly backed the truck out the way it had come, around the north side of the pavilion; the beep, beep, beep of the reverse-gear horn was drowned out at one point by metallic squealing, as one of the back wheels pinched and then flattened a blue-and-white trash can that had RECYCLE*RECICLE*RECYCLE*RECICLE stenciled endlessly around it, but eventually all four wheels were on pavement again, and the driver muscled the stick shift into first gear and began inching the big laboring old truck toward the Ocean Front curb, as policemen waved dozens of nearly naked people out of the way.

  At last the truck reached Windward; and when the traffic thinned, out past Main, it drove up Venice Boulevard to Lincoln, and then turned north, toward the Santa Monica Freeway.

  On the freeways, there you feel free.

  As the truck ascended the on-ramp, grinding with measured punctuation up through the gears, the purple-flowered oleanders along the shoulder waved their leafy branches in a sudden gust; and sunlight flashed in the rushing air where there was no chrome or glass reflecting it, as if the ghosts of dozens of angular old cars accompanied the laboring truck.

  In the steamy dimness under the flapping tarpaulin the jaws of the dead coelacanth creaked open, and a shrill faint whistling piped out of the throat as reversed peristalsis drove gases out of the creature’s stomach. The whistling ran up and down the musical scale in a rough approximation of the first nine notes of “Begin the Beguine,” and then a tiny gray translucency wobbled out of the open mouth, past the teeth, like a baby jellyfish moving through clear water.

  A puff of smoke that didn’t disperse at its edges, the thing climbed down over the plates of the fish’s lower jaw, clung for a moment to the shaking corrugated aluminum surface of the truck bed, then sprang up into the agitated dimness toward the close tent-roof of the tarpaulin. The wind sluicing along the sides of the dead fish caught the wisp and whirled it back and out under the flapping tarpaulin edge into the open air, where hot, rushing diesel updrafts lifted it above the roaring trucks and cars and vans to spin invisibly in the harsh sunlight.

  Traffic behind the flatbed truck slowed then, for suddenly the truck appeared to be throwing off pieces of itself: a glimpsed rushing surface of metal here, a whirling black tire there, glitters of chrome appearing first on one side of the truck and then the other, as if some way-ultraviolet light were illuminating bits of otherwise invisible vehicles secretly sharing the freeway. Then windshields were darkened in a moment of shadow as a long-winged yellow biplane roared past overhead, low over the traffic, with the figure of a man dimly visible standing on the top wing.

  After no more than two seconds the plane flickered and disappeared, but before winking out of visibility it had banked on the inland wind, as if headed northeast, toward Hollywood.

  CHAPTER 19

  “But then,” thought Alice, “shall I never get any older than I am now? That’ll be a comfort, one way—never to be an old woman—but then—always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like that!”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  BACK IN HIS OLIVE Street office after court, well in time for a healthful lunch, J. Francis Strube tossed his briefcase onto the long oak credenza and slumped his oversized frame into the padded leather McKie chair behind his desk.

  He had an appointment this afternoon, some guy whose wife was divorcing him. The man had sounded almost apologetic on the phone, clearly reluctant to hire an attorney because he hoped his wife would abandon the divorce action and come back to him. Strube would sympathize during this first consultation, let the guy ramble and emote and probably weep; during later sessions Strube could begin to raise his eyebrows over the man’s willingness to let the wife take so much stuff. Strube would interject, Oh, she’ll need it because she’ll be doing a lot of entertaining, eh?—delivered in a tone that would make Strube seem like a sympathetically angered friend. Well, if you want to let her have everything …

  Eventually Strube could get a man to refuse to part with a vacuum cleaner that he might never have actually used, or possibly ever even seen.

  It took more time, but Strube preferred nurturing rapacity in these timid clients to flattering the egos of the villains who just wanted to ditch the old wife and marry the twenty-year-old sex … pot. For the latter sort Strube would have to say, in tones of polite surprise, things like You’re fifty? Good Lord, you don’t look a day over forty. And, How did you put up with this for so long?

  Anyway, the timid ones needed attorneys. What they initially wanted, like first-time Driving Under the Influence offenders, was to appear in court in humble pro per, not realizing that judges had all been attorneys once, and planned to be again after they retired, and wanted to make of these fools examples of how badly unrepresented people fared.

  In a courthouse hallway this morning another attorney had told Strube a riddle.

  Question: What do a lawyer and a sperm cell have in common?

  Strube pursed his lips and leaned forward to pick up the newspaper that Charlotte had left on the desk. The telephone rang, but Charlotte would get it. Strube made it a point never to answer the phone on spec.

  He waited, but the intercom didn’t buzz. That was good, she was fielding whatever it was. He let himself start to read.

  He saw that Ross Perot was claiming to have backed out of the presidential race only because of threats from the Bush-campaign people. He smiled. Strube never voted, but he liked to see things shaken up. “Time for a Change!” was a political slogan that always appealed to him. He was about to flip the front page when he noticed the box at the bottom.

  FANS SEARCHING FOR “SPOOKY” FROM OLD SITCOM

  Strube read the story quickly, peripherally aware that his heartbeat was speeding up. When he had finished it, he pushed a button on the intercom.

  “Charlotte!” he squeaked. “Get in here and look at this.” No, he thought immediately, she might try to get the credit herself. “Wait, get me—” he began again, but she had already opened his office door and was staring in at him curiously.

  She was wearing another of the anonymous dark jacket-and-skirt combinations to which she had been confining herself ever since he’d made a blundering pass at her six months ago. “Look at what?” she asked.

  “Perot says Bush was going to wreck his daughter’s wedding,” he said absently, folding the paper and pushing it aside. “Did you read about that? Say, get me the telephone number of …” What had been the name of the damned snuff? Ouchie? “Goudie! Goudie Scottish Snuff, uh, Company. G-O-U-D-I-E. It’s in San Francisco.”

  “Snuff?”

  Strube raised the back of his pudgy hand to his nose and sniffed loudly. “Snuff. Like lords and ladies used to do. Powdered tobacco.”

  “Do you want me to call them?”

  “No, just get me the number.”

  Charlotte nodded, mystified, and walked back out to the reception desk, closing his office door behind her.

  If Nicky Bradshaw’s still alive, thought Strube excitedly, he’s gotta still be doing that snuff; and it’s a clue I’ll bet not a lot of people remember. And I’ll bet nobody but me remembers the actual brand name. God knows I ordered it often enough.

  Strube stood up and walked quickly across the carpet to the window overlooking Olive, and he stared down at the gleaming multicolored car roofs rippling through the lanes like beetles. Strube had a new BMW himself, but from up here it could look no different from any of the cars below him now. He was a member of Sports Club LA on Sepulveda—he had even got occasional business from his ad in the club’s networking newsletter—and he was proud of his healthful d
iet regimen, years having passed since he had last eaten real eggs or bacon or butter or sour cream; and his apartment on Sunset was expensive, but …

  Aside from his suits and the sectional furniture and some signed sailing prints on the walls, the apartment was pretty bare—in truth, about half of his worldly goods were in the goddamn credenza here in the office, along with the ceiling fan that he’d never taken out of its box and the routed cherrywood decoupaged J. FRANCIS STRUBE name plaque that a client had handcrafted for him and that he’d been embarrassed to put out on his desk because people might think he represented hippie dopers.

  But he could be … the attorney who located Spooky.

  Answer: Each of them has one chance in two million of becoming a human being.

  Of becoming somebody.

  It seemed to him now that, when he was twenty and twenty-one, he had mailed orders to the Goudie Snuff Company as often as he had mailed solicitation letters to the people whose names and addresses had appeared on the thrice-weekly foreclosure lists.

  He had worked as a legal secretary for Nicholas Bradshaw in ’74 and ’75, in Seal Beach. Bradshaw had handled mostly bankruptcy cases, which often came around to involving divorce and child custody, and young Strube had proved to have a natural knack for the tactics of family breakup.

  Strube had planned to go into show-business law—after law school he had let his mousy brown hair grow long and had worn crazy little granny glasses, and he had gone to work for Bradshaw mainly because Bradshaw had once been an actor—but somewhere along the line Bradshaw had developed an aversion to the TV and movie business; and without a contact, an in, access, Strube hadn’t been able to get any of the industry’s law firms to consider taking him on.

  Then after Bradshaw had just … up and disappeared … in ’75, Strube had been left without any job at all. He had hastily gone to work for a divorce and personal-injury attorney, and passed the bar in ’81. At last in ’88 had been able to open his own practice … but he was still just disassembling families.