Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  Kootie didn’t want to do any more work. Why was it always his muscles and joints that took the wear and tear? “What’s a six signal? I bet we don’t need it.”

  “Tramp telegraphers have to tap out a signal every hour, all night long. Called a ‘six signal.’ It’s to show that you’re still awake, alert, ready to participate. I used to just hook up a clock to a rotary saw blade, so it sent the signals for me, right on time, while I napped. Up, lad, it won’t take but a few moments.”

  Kootie struggled to his feet one more time, and then he took out the chalk and, crouching, drew a big oval all the way around the car, which, he now saw, was a wrecked old Dodge Dart, of God knew what color under the dust of years. This time he drew arrows radiating out from the circumference, and he spit several times outside the wobbly chalk line.

  “That’ll make it seem that we’re up and about, in a number of places,” said Edison, “and for the night I can clathrate myself inside your head again—voluntarily this time!—with all hatches battened down. Then we’ll be as damn hard to find as a gray hat in a rock pile.” It seemed to Kootie that this simile had been derived from experience. “And we should sleep, and we should sleep.”

  Edison used Kootie’s fingers to probe the car-door lock with a bit of wire he found on the pavement, but after a while he swore and tossed it away and just had Kootie punch in the wind-wing window with a chunk of concrete. Kootie’s arm was just barely long enough for his stretched-out fingers to reach the lock-post button.

  Kootie stepped back and opened the door—wincing at the echoing screech of the ancient hinges—and then he leaned inside, breathing shallowly in musty air that somehow nevertheless had a flavor of new houses.

  The seats and floor of the car proved to be stacked with dozens of ancient gallon paint cans that someone had once halfheartedly covered with a stiffened drop cloth, and Kootie had to lift some of the cans out and set them down on the pavement just to have room to sit with his legs stretched out. He didn’t know if the old man could feel the aching, stinging fatigue in his shoulders and knees—and in his hip, which pain he now remembered that the old man was responsible for—but Edison didn’t argue when Kootie suggested that this was enough, and that they could sleep sitting up.

  Kootie pulled the door closed—slowly, so that it wouldn’t squeal again. The broken wind-wing wasn’t letting in much fresh air, so he wrestled with the door’s crank handle and managed to open the passenger-side window several inches, enough to probably keep the fumes of mummified paint from overcoming him during the night. That done, he bent the old drop cloth snugly around his shoulders and shifted around until he found a position in which he could relax without setting off any big twinges of pain.

  The empty lot was unlit, and it was very dark inside the old car.

  Sometimes his father had come into Kootie’s room at bedtime and had haltingly and awkwardly tried to talk to the boy. Once, after Kootie had supposedly gone to sleep, he had heard his father, back out in the kitchen with his mother, dejectedly refer to the conversations as “quality time.” Still, it had been comforting, in its way.

  “So you fixed up this phone,” he ventured now, speaking quietly in the close shelter.

  “Hm? Oh, yes, that I did. Do you remember the story of Rumpelstiltskin? Your parents must have told it to you.”

  No. Kootie’s parents had told him all about Rama and Koot Hoomie and Zorro-Aster and Jiddu Krishnamurti (in whose holy-man footsteps he had been intended to follow), and about self-realization and meditation, and the doings of various Egyptian holy men. But at least he had heard about Rumpelstiltskin in school. Thank God for school. “Sure,” he said now, sleepily.

  “Well, you remember that the little man didn’t want anybody to know what his name was. That’s important if a person is like you and me—misfortunate enough to be tethered by a stout leash of responsibility to somebody who’s in the ghost world; it’s like we’ve got one foot outside of time, isn’t it, so that we react to noises and jolts just a split instant before they actually happen.”

  “You’ve had that happen too,” said Kootie faintly, slumping farther down in the warming seat.

  “Ever since I watched a playmate drown in a creek when I was five, son. So have a lot of unhappy people. And that … antenna we carry around makes us stand out to ghosts. They’re drawn to us, and without meaning any harm they can attach themselves to us and sympathetically induce the collapse of our time lines—kill us, like a parasite that kills its host.

  “People like you and me, if we manage to live long, have generally had a wanderjahr, a time of wandering around untraceably, often luckily giving a fake name and fake birth date, while we get the time to figure out what the hell’s going on. I was a plug telegrapher when I was sixteen, that’s like an apprentice, and for years I rode trains all over this country, because there was always ready work for any class of telegrapher during the Civil War. Blavatsky was doing her wander-time around then too: Europe, Mexico, Tibet. What you learn, if you’re lucky, is that you need a mask if you’re going to deal up close with ghosts. You can’t let them get a handle on you, not anything. Real name and real birth date, especially. Those are solid handles.”

  Edison blew a chuckle out of Kootie’s mouth. “One time in the early seventies I had to go to City Hall in Newark to pay real-estate taxes—last day, big fine if I didn’t—and the fellow behind the desk was one of the big solidified ghosts, who had managed the no doubt difficult task of scraping together enough alertness to hold a county job, and he asked me what my name was. Hah! I had to pretend I couldn’t remember! And pay the fine! My own name! Everybody in line thought I was an imbecile.”

  Kootie yawned so widely that tears ran down his cheeks, and it interrupted Edison’s monologue. “So who did you call that was still alive?” he asked. “That must be embarrassing—‘Hi, George, what are you doing there? Did you just this morning die or something?’ ”

  Breath whickered out of his nostrils as Edison laughed softly. “That’s just about exactly how it went. In 1921 I had got the spirit phone working: it required summoning back the ghost of my dead playmate—by then I had managed to cauterize the bit of him that had been stuck to me, sort of the way I’m stuck to you right now—and energizing him in a strong electromagnetic field. He was still my antenna. And then his augmented charge was amplified dramatically with an induction coil, and then he was … the operator.

  “I was trying to call a man named William Sawyer, who had died forty years earlier; Sawyer was an electrical inventor who claimed to have come up with the electric lamp before I did, and wanted me to buy him out. I told him to go to hell, I just left him in the dust, and then he came around to my place when I was giving an exhibition, right after Christmas in, it must have been, ’79. Sawyer came drunk, yelling and shouting that it was all fake, and he broke a vacuum pump and stole eight of the electric lamps, which I didn’t have a lot of in those days. In the years after that, I had some opportunities to help him—and I didn’t do it. I hadn’t forgotten the theft and the vandalism, you see, and whenever I was asked about him I made sure to drip—I mean, made sure to drop—some unflattering statements about him. He turned into a drunk, and wound up killing a man, and he died before he could go to prison. So, forty years later, I was trying to get him on the phone to …” Kootie’s hands lifted.

  “… Apologize?”

  After a few seconds of silence, Edison said, softly, “Yep.” He exhaled. “But you get a crowd on that line, it’s a party line, and everybody wants to talk. When they heard who was calling, somebody picked up, and I found myself talking to a mathematician who I had fired the day before! I was flabbergasted, and I said something like, ‘Lord, Tom, did you kill yourself today?’ All he wanted to do was recite poems to me, so I hung up and went round to his house. It developed that he had had a nervous breakdown, but had not in fact died. So I hired him back. But I had learned that people can sometimes throw ghosts in moments of high stress, and those ghosts can
sometimes wander away just exactly the same as though the people had died. They are the same.”

  “So … you quit work on the phone because of that?”

  Suddenly agitated, Edison said, “Those aren’t the people, the people you harmed, those ghosts. It’s like trying to make amends to somebody’s car, after they’ve parked it and walked away. Blavatsky was right when she claimed that the spirits called up by mediums are just animate shells. You can talk to the ghost of your dead uncle Bob, but Uncle Bob himself doesn’t know anything about it. Chesterton said that, I believe.” He shook Kootie’s head. “What you’ve got to do is somehow rehire the sons of bitches.”

  Rehire my mom and dad? thought Kootie. “But … they’re dead. What do you do about that?”

  For nearly a whole minute there was silence.

  Then, quietly, “Don’t look at me, son, I’m one of ’em myself. Go to sleep now.”

  A fleeting impression of a candle being blown out and a door being closed, and then Kootie was alone in his own head again. Before loneliness could creep up on him he closed his eyes, and he was instantly asleep.

  Beyond the dust-crusted glass of the car’s windows, out on the sidewalk past the end of the lot and the chain-link fence, a silhouette came shuffling along from the direction of Wilshire Boulevard. Only one arm swung as it ambled along, though the torso rocked as though another arm were swinging alongside too. The head was turning to look one way and another, with frequent pauses to glance down at the figure’s waist, but the silhouette registered no change in its pace as it walked on down the sidewalk, past the lot, and disappeared to the south.

  CHAPTER 26

  “… I wonder what’ll become of my name when I go in? I shouldn’t like to lose it at all—because they’d have to give me another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one. But then the fun would be, trying to find the creature that had got my old name! That’s just like the advertisements, you know, when people lose dogs—‘answers to the name of “Dash”: had on a brass collar’—just fancy calling everything you met ‘Alice,’ till one of them answered! Only they wouldn’t answer at all, if they were wise.”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass

  BY ELEVEN O’CLOCK IN the morning, Hollywood Boulevard was a crowded tourist street again, and it was the signs overhead—movie marquees, names of ethnic fast-food restaurants, huge red Coca-Cola logos, and the giant infantry soldier over the army-surplus store—that caught the eye. But when Sullivan had driven down the boulevard at dawn, it had been the pavements that he had watched; empty lanes still blocked by last night’s police barricades, litter in the gutters, and solitary junkies and long-night male and female prostitutes shambling wearily toward unimaginable refuges in the gray shadows.

  Sullivan turned down Cherokee, parked his van in the lot on the south side of Miceli’s and switched off the engine, and for a few minutes he just sat in the van and smoked a cigarette and sipped at a freshly popped can of beer. Thank God for the propane refrigerator, he thought.

  Just because he had parked here didn’t mean he had to eat at Miceli’s. He remembered a Love’s barbecue place on Hollywood Boulevard just a block or two away. He could even restart the van and go eat at Canter’s, or Lawry’s. What he should do, in fact, was get a to-go sandwich somewhere; he had no business blowing his finite money in sit-down restaurants.

  It had been here at Miceli’s, on that rainy night in the fall of ’86, that he had had his last dinner with Julie Nording; the dinner at which she had been so distant and cold, after which he had gone back to the apartment he’d shared with Sukie, and had got drunk and written his ill-fated sonnet.

  You’re here to exorcise the ghost, he told himself comfortably as the cold beer uncoiled in his stomach. Prove to yourself that there’s no more power to sting in those old memories—

  And then he winced and took a deep swallow of the beer, for he remembered his real ghosts: Sukie, who for years had been so close a companion that the two of them were almost one person, their love for each other so deeply implicit that it could be unspoken, ignored, and finally forgotten; and his father, whose wallet and key ring (and three Hires Root Beer cans) he and Sukie had intolerably left behind when they had mindlessly fled deLarava’s shoot in Venice Beach on Christmas Eve of 1986.

  He had spent this morning at City College. He had showered and washed his hair in the cologne-reeking men’s gym, setting his clothes and “scapular” and fanny pack on a bench he could see from the broad tile floor where the showerheads were mounted against the tile wall, so that he wouldn’t have to rent an authorized padlock for the brief use of a locker, and possibly have to show some ID; and then he had got dressed again and reluctantly walked over to the library.

  He’d made his way upstairs to the reference section, a maze of tall shelves full of ranked orange plastic file folders stuffed with newspapers and magazines, and endless sets of leather-bound volumes with titles like Current Digest of the Soviet Press and Regional Studies, and with some help he managed to find the long metal cabinets of drawers where the microfilm was kept.

  He’d pried out the boxed spool of the Los Angeles Times from July to December of 1990 and carried it to a projector in one of the reading booths. Once the film was properly threaded and rolling, he sat for several minutes watching July newspaper pages trundle past on the glowing screen—advertisements, comics, and all—until he inadvertently discovered that there was a fast-forward setting on the control knob. At last he found the first of November. (President Bush had “had it” with Saddam Hussein; the governor’s race between Wilson and Feinstein was still too close to call.)

  The Elizalde story was at the bottom corner of the front page: THREE DEAD IN CLINIC BLAZE. According to the text, a firebomb had been detonated in Dr. Angelica Anthem Elizalde’s psychiatric clinic on Beverly Boulevard at 8:40 P.M. on Halloween night. The resulting three-alarm fire brought fifty firefighters, from Los Angeles, Vernon, and Huntington Park, who put the fire out in forty-five minutes. Dr. Elizalde, 32, had suffered second-degree burns while trying to extinguish one of the patients who had caught fire; altogether, three of her patients had died, though only that one had died of burns; and five more were hospitalized with unspecified traumas. Police and the Fire Department were investigating the incident.

  Sullivan had fast-forwarded the microfilm to the November 2 issue. The story was still on the front page—now Dr. Elizalde had been arrested and charged with manslaughter. Several of the survivors of her Wednesday-night group-therapy session had told police that Elizalde had been conducting a séance when the disaster had struck, and that hideous apparitions had materialized in the air; and they claimed that one of the patients, a man named Frank Rocha, had spontaneously burst into flames. Fire investigators noted that Rocha’s body had been incinerated. Police theorized that Elizalde had installed machinery to simulate the appearance of ghosts, and that this machinery had exploded during the fraudulent psychic performance … though they admitted that no traces of any such machinery had been found.

  The November 3 issue had moved the story to the front page of the second section, where it eclipsed the “Cotton Club” murder trial, which had apparently been hot news in 1990. Elizalde had raised her $50,000 bail, and then had apparently disappeared.

  The descriptions of the Halloween-night séance were fuller now, and more lurid—the surviving patients claimed that ropes of ectoplasm had burst from the bodies of many present, and that spirits of eviscerated babies, and of screaming women and babbling old men, had then formed in the air over their heads; and Frank Rocha had exploded into white-hot flames. It was now revealed that several of the patients who had had to be hospitalized were in fact confined in psychiatric wards with acute psychotic reactions.

  In the issue of November 4 it was confirmed that Elizalde had disappeared; police sources commented that until her arraignment they would not issue a bench warrant. Included in the article were quotes from an interview that the
LA. Weekly had done with Elizalde two months previous to what was now being referred to as the Día del Muerte Séance. “I find it effective,” she was quoted as having said, “to use the trappings of the so-called ‘occult’ in eliciting responses from credulous patients. It has no more intrinsic value than the psychiatrist’s cliché couch or the stained-glass windows in a church—it’s simply conducive.” Police were still speculating that she had decided to enhance the effect by somehow staging dangerous, faked supernatural phenomena.

  Sullivan had tucked the microfilm spool back into its box and returned it to the drawer, and then located the cited issue of LA. Weekly—an actual paper copy, not microfilm—and turned the pages to the interview.

  There had been a photograph of Dr. Elizalde in her consulting room, and, looking at it in the library this morning, Sullivan had winced. She was strikingly good-looking, with long black hair and big dark eyes, but she looked more like a gypsy fortune-teller than a psychiatrist: the photographer had caught her smilingly underlit over a glowing crystal ball the size of a melon, and behind her he could see saint-candles and all kinds of primitive little statues on shelves, and a framed print of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

  The interview itself had not been so bad. He had made notes of some of her statements:

  On ghosts: “Well, of course when a person dies, actually that person is gone; a TV set that was used only to view PBS is no different from one that never showed anything but Sunday morning televangelists, once the two sets have been disassembled—they’re both equal in their total absence now. But all of us who are still around have hooks in the memories of these dead people, unresolved resentments and guilts, and these things don’t stop being true, and being motivational, just because the person that caused them is dead, has stopped existing. By having my patients strongly pretend—oh hell, briefly believe—that they can communicate with the dead collaborators in their pasts, I let them forgive, or ask for forgiveness—‘give the pain to God’—and achieve peace. My patients don’t forget the old wrongs endured or committed, but the memories of them stop being actively, cripplingly poisonous. My methods facilitate this by letting the patients literalize the old ghosts. [ans. to quest.:] No, I don’t believe in ghosts at all. I’m a rational materialist atheist. By the charged term ‘God’ I mean objectivity. [ans. to quest.:] My patients are free to. I don’t preach.