Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  She began untying the laces of her sneakers, and Sullivan made himself look away from her long legs in the tight denim.

  “I hope you don’t trust everybody,” he said.

  Out of the top of her right sneaker she pulled a little leather cylinder with a white plastic nozzle at the top. It had a key ring at the base of it, and with the ring around her first finger she opened her hand to show it to him. “CN mace,” she said with a chillier smile. “In case the soup is bland. I don’t trust anybody … very far.”

  Sullivan discarded the idea of taking offense. “Good.” He straightened his legs out across the floor and hooked a finger through the loop at the corner of the fanny pack that was hanging on his left hip; then, not knowing whether he was being honest with her or showing off, he pulled on the loop—the zippers whirred open as the front of the canvas pack pulled away, exposing the grip of the .45 under the Velcro cross-straps.

  Her face was blank, but she echoed, “Good.”

  She had taken her shoes and socks off and pulled the jumpsuit free of her ankles and tossed it aside. She stretched her legs, wiggling her toes in the air.

  “But,” Sullivan went on. He unsnapped the belt and pulled it from around his waist, and then slid the fanny pack across the floor toward the door. “I’ve decided to trust you.”

  She stared at him expressionlessly for a long moment, but then she spun the leather-sleeved cylinder away. It bumped the heavy pack six feet away from where she sat, and she said softly, “All right. Are we partners, then? Do we shake on it?”

  On his hands and knees he crossed the floor to her. They shook hands, and he crawled back to his wall and sat down again.

  “Partners,” he said.

  “What do you know about ghosts?”

  To business, he thought. “People eat them,” he began at random. “They can be drawn out of walls or beds or empty air, made detectable, by playing period music and setting out props like movie posters; when they’re excited that way, magnetic compasses will point to ’em, and the air around tends to get cold because they’ve assumed the energy out of it. They like candy and liquor, though they can’t digest either one, and if they get waked up and start wandering around loose they mainly eat things like broken glass and dry twigs and rocks. They—”

  “Produce from the Mojave ranches.”

  “Amber fields of stone,” he agreed. “They’re frail little wisps of smoke when they’re new, or if they’ve been secluded and undisturbed. Unaroused, unexcited. The way you eat them is to inhale them. But if they wander around they begin to accrete actual stuff, physical mass, dirt and leaves and dog shit and what have you—”

  “What have you,” she said, politely but with a shudder, “I insist.”

  “—and they grow into solid, human-looking things. They find old clothes, and they can talk well enough to panhandle change for liquor. They don’t have new thoughts, and tend to go on and on about old grievances. A lot of the street lunatics you see—maybe most of ’em—are this kind of hardened ghost. They’re no good to eat when they get like that. I worked for a woman who stayed young by finding and eating ghosts that had been preserved in the frail state, in old libraries and hotels and restaurants. She lives on water, aboard the Queen Mary—”

  “I just heard about her! And she drowned her husband in the sea.”

  Sullivan crawled across the floor again and picked up Elizalde’s beer. “I never heard of her having a husband. May I?”

  Elizalde had one eyebrow cocked. “Help yourself, partner. I just wanted a sip to cut the dust.”

  Sullivan took a deep swallow of the chilly beer. Then he sat down next to her, setting the can down on the floor between them.

  “What do you know about séances?” he asked breathlessly. “Summoning specific ghosts?”

  She picked up the can and finished the beer before answering him. “I know a turkey can hurt you if he hits you with a wing—you’ve got to have ’em bagged up tight in a guinea sack. Excuse me. With ghosts, you’d be smart to have some restraints in place, before you call them. They do come when you call, sometimes. Séances are dangerous—sometimes one of them is for real.” She yawned, with another shudder at the end of it, and then she glanced at the two white hands braced against the door. Sullivan was thinking of the ghosts they’d seen in the parking lot a few minutes ago, and he guessed that she was too. “I’m not hungry,” she said in a low voice.

  He knew what she was thinking: Let’s not open the door. “Me either,” he said.

  “You’ve got your leather jacket for a pillow, and I can ball up my jumpsuit. Let’s go to sleep, and discuss this stuff when the sun’s up, hmm? We can even … leave the light on.”

  “Okay.” He stood up and took off the jacket, but then crouched and folded it on the floor just a couple of feet from her, and stretched himself out parallel to the wall.

  She had leaned toward the window to pick up the jumpsuit, and then she stared at him for several seconds. The gun and the mace spray were islands out in the middle of the floor.

  At last she sighed and stretched out beside him, frowning uncertainly as she set the empty beer can on the floor between them. “You … read the whole interview?” she said as she slowly lowered her head to the bunched-up jumpsuit. She was looking away from him, facing the wall. “The interview of me, in LA. Weekly?”

  Sullivan remembered reading, I’ve reacted against the whole establishment I was raised in, there—I’m not Catholic, I don’t drink, and I don’t seem to be attracted much to men.

  And he remembered Judy Nording, and Sukie, and his sonnet that had wound up so publicly in the trash. I suppose I’ve reacted too, he thought. “Yes,” he said gently.

  As he closed his eyes and drifted toward sleep, he thought: Still, Doctor, you did try a couple of sips of beer.

  BOOK THREE

  HIDE, HIDE, THE COW’S OUTSIDE!

  I don’t claim that our personalities pass on to another existence or sphere. I don’t claim anything because I don’t know anything about the subject; for that matter, no human being knows. But I do claim that it is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, this apparatus will at least give them better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and raps and ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication.

  —Thomas Alva Edison,

  Scientific American, October 30, 1920

  CHAPTER 33

  “But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  KOOTIE WOKE UP WHEN a black man nudged his foot with a bristly push broom. The boy straightened up stiffly in the orange plastic chair and blinked around at the silent chrome banks of clothes dryers, and he realized that he and the black man were the only people in the laundromat now. Whenever he had blinked out of his fitful naps during the long night, there had been at least a couple of women with sleepy children wearily clanking the change machine and loading bright-colored clothing into the washing machines in the fluorescent white glare, but they had all gone home. The parking lot out beyond the window wall was gray with morning light now, and apparently today’s customers had not yet marshaled their laundry.

  “My mom will be back soon,” Kootie said automatically, “she had to go back home for the bedspreads.” He had said this many times during the night, when someone would shake him awake to ask him if he was okay, and they had always nodded and gone back to folding their clothes into their plastic baskets.

  But it didn’t work this morning. “I should charge you rent,” said the black man gently. “Sun’s up, boy.”

  Kootie slid down out of the seat and pulled his new sunglasses out of his jacket pocket. “Sorry,
mister.”

  “You wouldn’t know anything about some chalk drawings somebody did on the outside of the building, would you?”

  Kootie put on the sunglasses before he looked up at the man. “No.”

  The man stared at him for a moment, then crinkled his eyes in what might have been a smile. “Oh well. At least it wasn’t gang-marks from our Kompton Tray-Fifty-Seven Budlong Baby Dipshits or whoever they are today. And at least it was just chalk.”

  Kootie’s head was stuffed and throbbing. “Are the chalk markings still there?”

  “I hosed ’em off just now.” Again he gave Kootie the wry near-smile. “Figured I’d let you know.”

  Kootie started to stretch, but he hitched and pulled his right arm back when the cut over his rib flared hotly in protest. “Okay, thanks.”

  He limped across the white linoleum, around the wheeled hanger-carts, to the glass doors, and as soon as he had pushed them open and stepped outside, he missed the stale detergent-scented air of the laundromat, for the dawn breeze was chilly, and harsh with the damp old-coins smell of sticky trash-can bottoms.

  A half-pint bottle of 151-proof Bacardi rum had cost him sixteen dollars yesterday afternoon—six for the bottle, and a ten-dollar fee for the woman who had gone in and bought it for him. By her gangly coltish figure Kootie had judged her to be only a few years older than himself, but her tanned face, under the lipstick and eyeliner and flatteringly acne-like sores, had been as seamed and lined as a patch of sunbaked mud. Edison had made Kootie tear the ten-dollar bill jaggedly into two pieces before giving one half of it to the woman prior to the purchase; he had laughingly said that this made her his indentured servant, but neither Kootie nor the woman had understood him. He had wordlessly given her the other half of the bill after she had delivered the bottle.

  Edison had already had Kootie buy a roll of adhesive tape and a box each of butterfly bandages and “Sterile Non-Stick Pads,” and then in a patch of late-afternoon sunlight behind a hedge on a side street off Vermont, Edison had pulled up Kootie’s shirt to look at their wound, which had still been perceptibly leaking blood even though Kootie had been keeping his fist or his elbow pressed against it almost without a break since he had got away from the Southern California Edison truck half an hour earlier.

  It was a V-shaped cut too big for him to be able to cover with his thumb, and Kootie had begun whimpering as soon as Edison started swabbing at it with a rum-soaked pad, so Edison had made Kootie swallow a mouthful of the rum. The taste was surprising—like what Kootie would have expected from film developer or antifreeze—but it did make his head seem to swell up and buzz, and it distracted him from the pain as Edison thoroughly cleaned the cut and then dried the edges, pulled them together, and fastened them shut with the I-shaped butterfly bandages.

  Then, with a pad taped over the closed and cleaned cut, Edison had had a sip of the rum himself. When Kootie had floundered back over the hedge and started down the sidewalk, he had seemed to be walking on the deck of a boat, and Edison steered him into a taquería to eat some enchiladas and salsa and drink several cups of Coke. After that Kootie had been sober but sleepy, and they had found the laundromat, had furtively marked up the wall outside it, and finally had gone in to nap in one of the seats. The nap had continued, with interruptions, all night.

  He shivered now in the morning breeze and shoved his hands into his pockets. He knew he must be sober, but the pavement still didn’t seem firmly moored.

  He felt his mouth open involuntarily, and he wearily braced himself for forcing it shut against some crazy outburst, but Edison just used it to say, grumpily, “Where are we now?”

  “Walking on Western,” said Kootie, quietly even though there were no other pedestrians on the sidewalk. “Looking for a bus to take us to a beach.”

  “Final discorporation is on my agenda today, is that it? Why did we have to go outside so early? It’s cold. It was warm back in that automat.”

  Each spoken syllable was an effort, and Kootie wished Edison wouldn’t use so many of them. “They washed the chalk off the wall,” he said hoarsely. Cars were rumbling past at his left, and his voice wasn’t loud, but he knew Edison could hear him.

  “Ah! Then you’re a clever lad to have got away quickly.” Kootie’s mouth opened very wide then, so that the cold air got all the way in to his back teeth, and he was afraid Edison was going to bellow something that would be audible to any early-morning workers who might already be in these shadowed tax offices and closed movie-rental shops—but it was just a jaw-creaking yawn. “I shouldn’t stay out here, in my excited state, like this. Compasses will be wagging. I’ll go back to sleep. Holler for me if you—mff!”

  Kootie had stumbled on a high curb and fallen to his knees.

  “What’s the matter?” said Edison too loudly. Kootie took the ending r sound and prolonged it into a groan that rose to a wail. “Don’t talk so much,” Kootie said despairingly. “I can’t breathe when you do.” He sniffed. “I bet we didn’t get one full half hour of sleep last night without somebody waking us up to ask us something, or yelling at their kids or dropping baby bottles.” He tried to struggle back to his feet, and wound up resting his forehead on the sidewalk. “I can still taste those enchiladas,” he whispered to the faint trowel lines in the surface of the pavement. “And the rum.”

  “This won’t do,” came Edison’s voice out of Kootie’s raw throat. Kootie’s arms and legs flexed and then acted in coordination, and he got his feet under himself and straightened all the way back up. Slanting morning sunlight lanced needles of reflected white glare off of car windshields into his watering eyes.

  “You’re just not used to the catnap system,” said Edison kindly. “I can go for weeks on a couple of interrupted hours a night. You go to sleep, now—I’ll take the wheel for the next couple of miles.”

  “Can we do that?” asked Kootie. He left his mouth loose for Edison’s reply, but had to close it when he felt himself starting to drool.

  “Certainly. What you do is stand still for a moment here, and close your eyes—then in half a minute or so I’ll open your eyes but you’ll already have started to go to sleep, get it? You’ll go ahead and relax, and you won’t fall. I’ll hold us up, and walk and talk. Okay?” Kootie nodded. “Close your eyes, now, and relax.”

  Kootie did, and he let himself fall away toward sleep, only peripherally aware of still being up in the air, and of the daylight when his eyes were eventually opened again. It was like falling asleep in a tree house over a busy street.

  And his confused memories and worries wandered outside the yard of his control and began bickering among themselves, and assumed color and voices and became disjointed dreams.

  His gray-haired father was at the front door of their Beverly Hills house, arguing with someone from the school district again. Sometimes Kootie’s parents would keep him home from school when science classes prompted him to ask difficult questions on topics like the actual properties of crystals and the literal meanings of words like energy and dimension.

  “We’re saving it for the boy,” his father was saying angrily. “We’re not selfish here. In my youth I had the clear opportunity to become a nearly perfect jagadguru, but I sacrificed that ambition, I unfitted myself by committing a theft, so that the boy could become the jagadguru perfectly, in psychic yin-and-yang twinhood with one who was the greatest of the unredeemed seers. The unredeemed one won’t be able to accompany our boy to godhood, but he will be able to achieve redemption for himself by serving as the boy’s guide through the astral regions. Right now the guide must wait—masked in the boy’s persona ikon, as he will eventually occupy a place in the boy’s persona. In order for the union to be seamless, it must occur after the boy has achieved puberty.”

  Kootie had heard his father say much the same thing to his mother, on the nights Kootie had tiptoed back up the hall after his bedtime. It all had to do with the Dante statue, and the drunks and crazy people who wanted to talk to Don Tay.

/>   His father waved ineffectually. “Clear off, or I’ll have no choice but to summon the police.”

  But now Kootie could see the man standing grinning on the front doorstep, and it was the one-armed man with the tiny black unrecessed eyes.

  Kootie flinched, and the dream shifted—he was lying in the back seat of a car, half asleep, rocking gently with the shock absorbers on the undulating highway and watching the door handle gleam in reflected oblique light when the occasional streetlamp swept past out in the darkness. He was relaxed, slumped in the tobacco-scented leather upholstery—this wasn’t Raffle’s Maverick, nor the old marooned Dodge Dart he had slept in on Wednesday night, nor the Fussels’ minivan. He was too warm and comfortable to shift around and look at the interior, but he didn’t have to. He knew it was a Model T Ford. The driver was definitely his father, though sometimes that was Jiddu Parganas and sometimes it was Thomas Edison.

  Kootie smiled sleepily. He didn’t know where they were driving to, and he didn’t need to know.

  But suddenly there was a screech of brakes, and Kootie was thrown forward into the back of the front seat—he hit it with his open palms and the toes of his sneakers.

  The dream impact jolted him out of sleep, and so he was awake when his palms and the toes of his sneakers hit the cinder-block wall an instant later; using the momentum of the leap he had found himself making, he flung one leg over the top of the wall, and before he boosted himself up and dropped into the dirt lot on the other side, he glanced behind him.

  The glance made him scramble the rest of the way over the wall and land running, and he was across the lot and over a chain-link fence before he had taken and exhaled two fast breaths, and then he was pelting away down a palm-shaded alley, looking for some narrow L-turn that would put still more angles and distance between himself and the Western Avenue sidewalk.