Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  Why, he wondered, would anyone want a short-sleeved formal coat?

  Well, it occurred to him, a magician might. To show that he didn’t have anything up his sleeves. Houdini was a magician, wasn’t he? Maybe I didn’t lose the mask after all—maybe I’m wearing it.

  He breathed deeply, and watched the ducks paddling out across the water. He was still nervous, but the sense of imposed isolation, of being the only moving thing on a microscope slide, had moved on past him.

  He looked at his hands, and in the middle of this dream-logic afternoon he wasn’t very surprised, or even very scared, to see (though the sight did speed up his heartbeat) that his hands were different. The fingers were thicker, the nails trimmed rather than bitten, and the thumbs were longer. There were a few small scars on the knuckles, but the scars he remembered were gone.

  He lifted the hands and ran the fingers through his hair, and immediately his arms tingled with goose bumps: for his hair felt kinky and wiry, not straight and fine as it normally did. But it was falling back into limp strands as he disordered it, and he could now feel again the constriction of creased leather around his elbows.

  When he lowered his arms he found himself catching the sudden weight of the plaster hands; he gripped them firmly and slung them safely under his left arm. A lightbulb broke with a muffled pop in the pocket of his leather jacket, but he didn’t need the lightbulbs anymore.

  “Um!” he said loudly, to catch Elizalde’s attention. “Hey, lady!”

  She stopped and looked back, and his first thought was that she was a much shorter person than he had originally thought. Then he realized that this was a different woman—plumper than Elizalde, and with curly dark hair unconfined by any sort of hat, and wearing a long skirt.

  But it had to be Elizalde. “Look at yourself,” he said—quickly, for the skirt was already becoming transparent.

  The woman looked down at her own legs, which were now again zipped into the tan jumpsuit. And though Sullivan had not blinked nor seen her figure shift at all against the background of pavement and distant buildings, she was taller, as if she had suddenly moved closer.

  He hurried up the narrow sunlit street toward her, and she let him get within ten feet of her before she stepped back.

  “You saw that?” he asked.

  Elizalde’s olive complexion had gone very pale at some point in the last minute. She looked at the lumpy bandanna Sullivan was carrying. “You’re not another damned ghost, are you?” she asked.

  “No, I’m as alive as you are. Did you see—”

  “Yes,” she interrupted, “both of us. God, I hate this stuff. Let’s not talk until we’ve got the street between us and the canals.”

  He followed her as she jaywalked across the one-way inland-bound lanes of South Venice. On the far side she stepped up the curb but then walked on the dirt between the curb and the sidewalk, toward Pacific Avenue. Sullivan followed her lead, stepping over weed clumps and Taco Bell bags and bottles in brown paper bags. Avoiding marked channels, he thought.

  They walked into the parking lot through a gap in the low wall. A red sign on a pole by the exit read WRONG WAY—STOP—SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE; and someone had crookedly stenciled SMOKE under the STOP.

  “There’s a canal running under this parking lot,” Sullivan ventured to say when they had walked out onto the broad cement face of it, ringed at a distance by light poles and low apartment buildings and shaggy eucalyptus trees in the chilly afternoon sun.

  “I can run in any direction from here,” said Elizalde shortly; “so can you. And anyway, we’re between two oppositely one-way streets, one facing the sea and one away. It should make us hard to fix. And you’ve got a powerful mask, haven’t you? Big enough for two, as we saw.”

  “Someone … focused on us back there, didn’t they?” said Sullivan. “And the mask came on full strength. Maybe because there were two of us, our fields overlapping, there beside your … ‘stasis of clarity, clarity of stasis.’ ”

  Elizalde was sweating. Her jumpsuit was bulky and lumpy, and he realized, belatedly, that she must be wearing another outfit under it. She stared at him. “That’s something I said, in that interview in LA. Weekly. Who are you? Quick.”

  “I’m Peter Sullivan, I’m an electrical engineer and I used to work in film, which might give you some clues. I’ve been out of town, too, traveling everywhere in the country except California.” He was breathless again. “Hiding from all this, from somebody who died. Well, I told you it was my father, didn’t I? But this Halloween is—is gonna be a heavy one. I’ll tell you frankly, there are people after me; but I’m sure you’re smart enough to know that there’ll be people looking for you too. I think you and I should work together, pool our resources. I’ve got this mask. And I’ve found a safe place to live, a waterfront apartment building that’s in a sort of psychic pea-soup fog.”

  She wasn’t looking convinced. Her dark eyes were still narrowed with suspicion and hostility.

  “And I know this city real well,” he went on lamely.

  Her voice was stiff when she answered him. “I too am familiar with Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles” she said.

  I get it, he thought wearily. You’re Mexican, you’ve got a blood-in-the-soil, soil-in-the-blood kinship with the place, and you don’t need a gringo sidekick. Our Lady Queen of the Angels, he thought; and it reminded him of the garbled lyrics of one of Sukie’s Christmas carols: Commander Hold-’Em, bone-dry king of angels … Death, Sukie had meant, the Grim Reaper. In this kind of crisis, here in L.A., suddenly and very deeply he missed his twin sister, who had gone away with Commander Hold-’Em.

  “Lady,” he said, almost hopelessly, “I need a partner. I think you do too.”

  She frowned past him at the cars crossing in both directions over on Pacific Avenue … and abruptly he knew that she was going to refuse, politely but firmly, and just go away. Probably she wouldn’t come back here, probably she’d go looking for Frank somewhere else, where Sullivan would never find her.

  “Don’t decide right now,” he said hastily, “no, don’t even speak. I’ll speak. I’ll be at Bluff Park in Long Beach tonight at eight. That’s wide open, you can drive by in a cab, in a disguise, and if you don’t like the look of it you can go right on past, can’t you? Or, if you like, you can run away in the meantime, be in San Diego by then, be hiding up a tree somewhere. I’ll be at Bluff Park. At eight. Tonight. Goodbye.”

  He turned his back on her and walked quickly away, toward Pacific and his van and, somewhere not too many minutes distant, some dark bar with a men’s room.

  O rum key, O ru-um key to O-bliv-ion, he sang in his head.

  CHAPTER 30

  “How cheerfully he seems to grin,

  How neatly spreads his claws, And welcomes little fishes in, With gently smiling jaws!”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  BUT I SWALLOWED HIM, thought Kootie dully for the dozenth time.

  He was lying awkwardly across the back seat of the van, on his left shoulder, which had gone numb. His whole spine ached every time the van leaned around a corner.

  I swallowed him, like the whale swallowed Jonah. (Well, I inhaled him, actually.) But can I throw up the ghost? Cough him out? Or will they really have to cut me open to get it? It’s in my head!

  At the Music Center yesterday Edison had said, They’ll kill you and eat me. Was that really what was going to turn out to be true?

  The driver had looped a pair of headphones over his bald scalp, and from time to time he spoke into a tiny microphone that stuck out under his chin. The other man had found KLSX on the radio, and his head was jogging to some old rock song from before Kootie’s time.

  Kootie was shocked again by their indifference. Were they used to driving little boys off to be killed?

  All at once his right elbow was pressed painfully into his ribs against the sudden restraint of the seat belt—the minivan was slowing. Kootie discovered that
he couldn’t sit up again, with his feet tied together to the sidepost of the seat. He tried to push himself up, but his left arm was as numb and uselessly limp as if it belonged to someone else.

  “Low gear, and slow,” said the man in the passenger seat, “and keep the wheels dead straight.”

  “I’ve driven up a ramp before,” said the driver.

  A grating clank jarred the minivan. The pressure against Kootie’s ribs and right elbow was abruptly gone, and he was rocked back against the seat—the minivan had moved slowly forward, and the front end was mounting some incline; a ramp, apparently. Kootie couldn’t see the windshield, but the men’s heads were in shadow now, and the interior of the minivan was darker.

  “As soon as the front wheels are over the lip, give it a boost, to clear the oil pan—then brake hard as soon as the back wheels are in.”

  “I’ve driven up a ramp before.”

  The motor gunned briefly and the front end of the minivan dropped, and Kootie was again flung against the taut seat belt.

  The driver switched off the engine, ratcheted up the parking brake, and opened the door—it clunked against something, and the metal echoes told Kootie that the van had been driven up into the back of a truck, like the ambulance in Die Hard.

  Both of the men climbed out of the Fussels’ van, shuffled to the back of the truck, and then Kootie heard them hop down to some pavement. After that, with an abrupt dimming of the already-shadowy light into complete darkness, he heard some heavily clanging metal things tossed inside, and then the clattering rumble of the sliding back door being pulled down.

  Kootie’s eyes were wide, and his straining to see something in the pitch blackness only made imaginary rainbow pinwheels spin in his vision.

  They could have left me a light, he thought. He was clinging to the sense of the words, for his breathing and his heartbeat were very fast, and (even more than starting to thrash and scream with not any particle of control at all) he was afraid he would wet his pants. A flashlight left on, I could have paid for the batteries. The van’s headlights, they could have jumped the van battery later from the truck battery. A fucking Zippo lighter!—left flaming and wedged in the console somewhere.

  Usually Kootie was uncomfortable using bad words, but today in this total darkness he clung to it. One fucking Zippo lighter, he thought again. Above the tape, the skin over his cheekbones was cold and stiff with tears.

  He waited for Edison to yell at him … but he caught nothing from the old man. Perhaps he had deserted Kootie too. Maybe now these men would let him go, if Edison had gone …? Kid-stuff nonsense.

  The truck’s engine started up now—it was louder than the minivan’s had been. Through the padded seat under him Kootie felt the jar as the truck was put into gear, and then the whole mobile room was moving forward, with the minivan rocking inside it.

  And a moment later Kootie jumped, for suddenly, silently, there was a dim light in one corner of the truck—outside the minivan, up by the right front bumper, a moving yellow glow. Then he could hear dragging footsteps—heavy, an adult—on the metal floor.

  The minivan door was pulled open on that side, and a face leaned in, waveringly lit from below by a flashlight strung to swing around the person’s neck. The glittering little eyes were like spitty sunflower seeds stuck onto the white skin under the eyebrows.

  “Let me tell you a parable,” said the voice Kootie remembered. “A man walking down the road saw another man in a field, holding a live pig upside-down over his head under the branches of an apple tree. ‘What are you doing?’ asked the first man. ‘Feeding apples to my pig,’ said the second man. ‘Doesn’t it take a long time, doing it that way?’ asked the first man. And the man in the field said, ‘What’s time to a pig?’ ”

  Kootie’s eyes were wide and he was just moaning into the clotted tape between his jaws. The whole truck seemed to be dropping away into some dark abyss, hopelessly far below the lost sunlit streets of L.A.

  Mindlessly, Kootie shouted against the duct tape gag—

  “Al! Help me, Al!”

  Sherman Oaks had called the exchange again at 4 P.M., and at last the operator had had something to say besides Nothing yet, dude. The man had given Oaks a telephone number and had suggested that he call it at his earliest possible convenience. Oaks used his last quarter to call the number.

  “Where are you?” some man asked as soon as Oaks had identified himself. “We got a van and a truck circling each other down in Inglewood, and if they have to drive around much longer, the man says your tithe goes up to fifteen percent.”

  “I’m at Slauson and Central, by the trainyards,” Oaks said.

  “Truck’ll be there in … six or seven minutes. It’s an Edison truck, black and orange—”

  “What?”

  “SCE—what we could get quick. Is that a problem? The truck’s not stolen; the driver’s real Edison, but he’s on the network barter, and he was right in the area where they picked up the van. After we talked to him, he just called in Code Seven or something.”

  Oaks groped to find a reason for his inordinate dismay, and found one. “I need a big boxy truck, with ramps, that you can drive a car into! I’ve got no use for some damn boom or crane thing—” He was working up genuine outrage now. This was wrong. “I’ll pay no tithe at all for some damn—”

  “Jeez, man, this is the kind you want. Edison’s got all kinds of vehicles, not just those repair things.”

  “… Oh,” said Oaks, feeling like a cloud chamber in which the vacuum had just been violated, so that rain was condensing inside. “Okay. It’s just that …”

  “Sure. Now listen, there’s a gun in the back of the truck, along with the stuff you asked for. The driver insisted that this scenario be set up so it could look like a hijacking if anything goes wrong, okay? Don’t touch the gun, it’s got smeary untraceable fingerprints on it right now.”

  “But there is a knife there, too? I need a knife—” I can’t kill the boy with a noisy gun, Oaks thought.

  “Your knife’s there too. Try to relax, will you? Get in touch with your Inner Child.” The line went dead, and Oaks hung up.

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying not to hear the shrill voices in the exhalation.

  Outer child you mean, he thought—it’s the Inner Old Man I want to … get in touch with.

  In an Edison truck! The shudder that accompanied the thought bewildered him.

  He bent and with his one hand picked up the cardboard box at his feet, then stepped away from the pay telephone to let one of the impatient crack-cocaine dealers get to it.

  The box rattled in his hand. Tithe, he thought bitterly. It’s like taxing waitresses’ tips—the man taking the cut can be trusted to overestimate the actual take. In the box Oaks had packed ten little glass vials, which was supposed to represent a tenth of the garden-fresh ghosts he would collect during the upcoming month. He had brought it along in advance this way to “show humble.”

  He had stuck each vial into a condom. Obstadt had probably never seen the raw product before, and he would doubtless imagine that this eccentric packaging was standard in the trade. Nine of the vials were in Ramses condoms, but one was in a Trojan.

  Safe sexorcism. The Trojan hearse. Oaks had no intention of paying any more tithe. If Obstadt was still just a dilettante, well, he could take up an interest in fine wines or something; if by this time he was actually riding piggyback on the Maduro Man, though, he would be in the same jam that Oaks had been in in 1929.

  (This morning Oaks had begun to remember events from before 1989; and he had concluded that he was a good deal older than he had thought.)

  After hurriedly gathering up the thousand smokes and handing them over to one of Obstadt’s men, and then packing up these ten, he had had only four unlabeled ones left to inhale himself: four miserable, vicious, short-lived gang boys, as luck would have it, the sort of bottled lives he ordinarily disdained as pieces-a-shit. They hadn’t done much to hold back the t
umultuous army of the Bony Express, clamoring and shouting in Oaks’s head.

  In the turbulence, old memories were being shaken free of the riverbed of his mind, and wobbling up to the surface (like the unsavory old corpse that had bobbed up in the Yarra River in Melbourne in 1910, right after the manacled Harry Houdini had been dropped into the river for one of his celebrated escapes; and it had been a natural, if distasteful, mistake to pounce on the ragged old thing, imagining that it was Houdini freshly dead at last.)

  He remembered living in Los Angeles in the 1920s, when neon lighting was so new and exotic that its ethereal colored glow was mainly used to decorate innovative churches—the “Mighty I AM” cathedral, and Aimee Semple MacPherson’s giant-flying-saucer-shaped Angelus Temple on Glendale Boulevard. Under some other name, Oaks had been a follower of all kinds of spiritualist leaders, even joining William Dudley Pelley’s pro-Nazi “Legion of Silver Shirts”—though when, as required in the Silver Shirts, he had been asked to give the exact date and time of his birth, he had given false ones. Actually, he had not known what his real birth date might be; and so, lest he might give the correct date and time unconsciously, he had been careful to give the published birth figures of a randomly chosen movie star.

  (It had been Ramon Novarro, and Oaks had occasionally wondered, though never with remorse, if Novarro’s brutal death in the early hours of Halloween, 1969, might have been a long-delayed consequence of that lie.)

  And in 1929 he had somehow inhaled a ghost that had been stored in an opaque container; and the stinking lifeless thing had choked his mind, blocked his psychic gullet, rendered him unable to inhale any more ghosts at all. (He thought of the collapsed face he had seen yesterday on the steps down to the parking level at the Music Center up on Temple.)

  Oaks knew that he had got past that catastrophe somehow. (A suicide attempt? Something about his missing arm? The memories were like smoke on a breeze.) Some psychic Heimlich maneuver.