Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  “Original Recipe,” said Elizalde over her shoulder as she stepped past Sullivan and opened the refrigerator.

  “Good,” said Bradshaw. “That’s what she likes. I hope you brought enough.”

  An hour later Sullivan was sitting cross-legged on the dusty rug in Bradshaw’s dim office, staring idly at the featureless white glow of the old man’s TV screen and gnawing a cold chicken wing.

  Bradshaw’s “honey pie,” a heavy young woman in tight leotards and a baggy wool sweater, had burst in shortly after they’d carried all the supplies to the office, and after the introductions (Johanna, this is Thomas Edison—Mr. Edison, my honey pie Johanna) she had told Bradshaw that “the pigs on the boat were just burping, not smoking yet.”

  After that, Johanna and Elizalde had gone out again in Bradshaw’s car to buy supplies—bandages, hydrogen peroxide, a secondhand portable movie projector, a pint of tequila for Elizalde, more beer and more Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a box of sidewalk chalk, which Kootie had insisted on.

  When they had got back Elizalde had cleaned the cut in Kootie’s side and secured it with the bandages and put on a more expert-looking dressing, and then they had torn open the KFC bags.

  The chicken was now gone, and Sullivan had had several of the beers.

  He tossed the chicken bone onto his newspaper place mat and took a sip of his latest beer. “Angelica,” he said, “could you pass me that muffin?”

  Elizalde looked at him coldly. “Why do you call it a muffin?”

  He stared back at her. “Well, it’s … a little round thing made out of dough.”

  “So’s your head, but I don’t call it a muffin. This is a roll.” She picked it up and leaned across the newspapers to hold it out. “Don’t get drunk for this,” she added.

  “Keep the roll,” he said. “I had my heart set on a muffin.”

  “I wish I could get drunk,” said Bradshaw grumpily. He had crunched up a succession of red cinnamon balls as the others had passed around the chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy, and now he poured himself another glass of whatever it was that he was drinking—some red fluid that also reeked of cinnamon. “My pigs and TV are useless while Mr. Edison’s here.”

  Sullivan had decided not to ask about the smoking pigs, but he waved his beer at the white-glowing television. “What’re you watching?”

  “Channel Two,” said Bradshaw, “CBS, my old alma mater.”

  “I’ll bet I could mess with it and get you a better picture.” Sullivan felt tightly tensed, as if any move he made would break something in the cluttered office.

  “It’s not on for the picture,” wheezed Bradshaw. “Ghosts are an electrical brouhaha in the fifty-five-megahertz range—and Channel Two is the—closest channel to that. The brightness control on that set is—turned all the way to black, right now—believe it or not.”

  “That’s awfully shortwave,” commented the boy who claimed to be Edison.

  “You’re a shortwave critter,” Bradshaw said. “And a damn big one. Even if you were a dozen miles away—you’d still show up on the screen here as a—white band. But standing here you’re hogging the whole show. We could have the ghost of—goddamn Godzilla standing right outside, and I wouldn’t have a clue.”

  “Don’t you people have a telephone to build?” asked Elizalde.

  Sullivan looked irritably across the newspapers at her—but then with a flush of sympathy he realized that she was as tense as he was. He remembered how she had bravely pretended to be eager to go witchcraft-shopping this morning, when he had been ready to sit holed up in the apartment all weekend; and for a moment, before he sighed and got to his feet, he felt a flicker of pitying love for her, and of disgust with himself.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Household current should be enough—I bought a train-set transformer, and there’s the Ford coil.”

  Elizalde had got up too, and was lifting candles and herb packets and tiny bottles of oil out of her shopping bag.

  “What did you have in mind?” asked Kootie, who was sitting crouched like a bird up on the back of the old couch. “Let’s be speedy, it’s less than twelve hours to midnight, and I want to be clathrated damn deep, out of range of any magnets, when church bells are ringing the first strokes of Halloween.”

  “You’re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer, you won’t dissolve! I’ll race you into the water!” It had been a man’s voice that had said it, calling happily. Sullivan remembered the two Coke cans he had dropped on the floor back in the apartment, and he didn’t want to remember whose voice it had been that had said, “I’ll race you into the water!”

  “A bulb with a carborundum button instead of a filament,” he said loudly, “charged, with the eventual brush of electric discharge … focused through a goddamn condensing lens … onto the quartz filament, which we’ll blacken with soot, inside a Langmuir gauge. It’ll work like the vanes in a radiometer, wiggle in response to the light coming through the lens. We can break a thermometer to get a drop of mercury to put in the gauge, and then we can evacuate it to a good enough rarefication with a hose connected to the sink faucet …”

  But the twins had been feeling nauseated ever since eating the potato salad at lunch, and were queasy even at the smell of the Coppertone lotion, and they had decided to stay out of the surf and just lie on the towels, on the solid bumpy mattress of the sand.

  Kootie had been listening as Sullivan had been describing his proposed device, and he now interrupted: “You don’t want a magnet in the receiver. This is such a sensitive thing you’re talking about that an actual magnet in the same room would draw the voices of all the ghosts in Los Angeles. We’ll have enough trouble with fields caused by the changing electrical charges. Use chalk, I had the ladies buy some.” He paused, and then said, “We still have some of the Miraculous Insecticide Chalk, Mr. Edison. That won’t do, Kootie, this has to be round, like a cylinder. Good thought, though.”

  “Chalk?” asked Sullivan, trying to concentrate.

  Their father had shrugged, and his remark about Speedy Alka-Seltzer had hung in the air as he turned away from them, toward the foam-streaked waves, and young Pete had been able to see the frail white hair on the backs of his father’s shoulders fluffing in the ocean breeze.

  “The friction of a piece of wet chalk varies with changes in its electric charge,” Kootie said. “Without a charge it’s toothy and has lots of friction, but it’s instantly slick when there’s a current …”

  The three cans of Hires Root Beer were laid out like artillery shells, awaiting their father’s return from his swim. There was one for him, and one each for Pete and Elizabeth. Their stepmom had explained that she didn’t drink soda pop, so there were only three cans.

  “… A spring connected to the center of the diaphragm,” Kootie was saying, drawing with his hands in the stale dim air, “with the other end pressed against the side of the rotating chalk cylinder. The fluctuations in the current from your Ford coil will change the mechanical resistance of the chalk, so the needle will wiggle, you see, as the chalk rapidly changes from slick to scratchy, and the wiggle will be conveyed to the diaphragm.”

  “It sounds goofy,” quavered Sullivan, forcing himself to pay attention to what Kootie was saying, and not to the intrusive, unstoppable, intolerably resurrected memory.

  “It works,” said Kootie flatly. “A young man named George Bernard Shaw happened to be working for me in London in ’79, and maybe you’ve read his description of my electromotograph receiver in his book The Irrational Knot.”

  Sullivan shivered, for he was suddenly sure that the ghost this boy carried was, in fact, Thomas Edison. Sullivan’s voice was humble as he said, “I’ll take your word for it.”

  But he didn’t add, “sir.” Aside from police officers, there was only one man he had ever called “sir.”

  Their stepmother didn’t even bother to act very surprised when Pete and Elizabeth screamed at her that their father was in trouble out in the water. The old man had swum out through th
e waves in his usual briskly athletic Australian crawl, but he was floundering and waving now, way out beyond the surf line, and their stepmother had only got to her feet and shaded her eyes to watch.

  “… and the carborundum bulb should be sensitive enough to pick the ghost up, and reflect his presence in the brush discharge. He should easily be able to vary it, so it’s a signal that’s going through the lens into the Langmuir viscosity gauge …”

  Sullivan blinked stinging sweat out of his eyes.

  Their stepmother hadn’t eaten any of the potato salad, and she seemed to be fine; but she wouldn’t even take one step across the dry sand toward the water, and so the twins had gone running down to the surf all by themselves, even though cramps were wringing their stomachs …

  Kootie had asked Sullivan a question, and he struggled to remember what it had been. “Oh,” he said finally, “right. We’ll have primed the quartz filament with a ground vibration, set it ringing by waving a magnet past the little swiveling iron armature in the gauge, and then I guess we get rid of the magnet, outside the building. The quartz starts from a peak tone, and then the vibration will damp down as the quartz loses its initial … its initial ping. We’ll gradually lose volume, but even with the damping radiometer effects of the signal it’s getting from the focused light, and from friction with the trace of mercury gas in the gauge, the sustaining vibration should last a good while.”

  Both of the twins had paused when they were chest deep and wobbling on tiptoe in the cold, surging water. But Elizabeth let the buoyancy take her, and began dog-paddling out toward their distant suffering father; while Pete, frightened of the deep water that was frightening their father, and of the clenching pain in his abdomen, had turned and floundered back toward shore.

  “You’re the antenna,” said Kootie, who was now looking down at him curiously from his perch on the couch back, “but you’ll need a homing beacon too, a lure.”

  And after a while Elizabeth had dragged herself back, exhausted and sick and alone.

  “I’m that as well,” said Sullivan bleakly. “I’m still his son.”

  They had not of course opened the three Hires cans, though the twins were destined to glimpse the cans again twenty-seven years later … again in Venice.

  And Sullivan’s face went cold—the memory of Kelley Keith’s face blandly observing the drowning of her husband had overlaid memories of deLarava’s face, and at long, long last he realized that they were the same woman.

  “Nicky!” he said, so unsteadily that Elizalde shot him a look of spontaneous concern. “Loretta deLarava is Kelley Keith!”

  “Shoot,” said Bradshaw. “I’ve known that since 1962.”

  “When we were ten? You could have told us!”

  “You’d have wanted to go back to her?”

  Sullivan remembered the pretty young face looking speculatively out at the old man drowning beyond the waves. “Jesus, no.”

  “She killed your father,” said Bradshaw. “Just like she killed me. And now she wants to erase both guilts. Both reproaches, both awarenesses. If we’re gone, see, it can be not true. For her.”

  “She, no, he drowned, she didn’t kill him—”

  “She fed you and your sister and your father. Poisoned potato salad. All in the golden afternoon.”

  Kootie bounced impatiently down off the couch, and as he began pacing the floor he picked up Sullivan’s pack of Marlboros. Now he shook one out and, with it hanging on his lower lip, slapped his pants pockets. “Somebody got a match?”

  “It’s the kid’s lungs!” protested Elizalde.

  “One cigarette?” said Kootie’s voice. “I hardly think—It’s all right, Mrs. Elizalde, I’ve smoked Marlboros before. Really? Well, she’s right, you shouldn’t. Don’t let me catch you with one of these in your hand again!” He took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it back in the pack. “You started it, you were working my hands. Don’t argue with your elders, the lady was right. I was out of line … dammit.” He turned a squinting gaze on Sullivan. “I think your plan will work. It’s better than mine was, in some ways. I like the carborundum bulb to focus just the one signal—it just might eliminate the party-line crowd. Let’s get busy.”

  Bradshaw volunteered to clear off the top of his desk, and soon Kootie and Sullivan were laying out globes and boxes and wires across the scarred mahogany surface. Bradshaw even dragged a couple of old rotary-dial telephones out of a cupboard for them to cannibalize. Twice Sullivan went out to the van, once for tools and once to disconnect and tote back the battery so as to have some solid 12-volt direct current, and at one point, while he was doing some fast, penciled calculations on the desktop, Elizalde stepped up behind him and briefly squeezed his shoulder. She’d been intermittently busy with something in the little added-on kitchen, and the stale cinnamon air in the office was getting sharp with the steamy fumes of mint and hot tequila.

  As his fingers and brain followed the inevitable chessboard logic of potentials and resistances and magnetic fields, Sullivan’s mind was a ringing ground zero after the detonation of his hitherto-entombed memories, with frightened thoughts darting among the raw, broken ruins of his psyche.

  I was there when he drowned! The Christmas shoot in ’86 was not the first time I was ever at Venice Beach—no wonder I kept seeing déjà-vu sunlit overlays of the Venice scene projected onto those gray winter streets and sidewalks. I had been there when he drowned on that summer day in ’59, and Loretta deLarava is Kelley Keith, our stepmother, and she killed him, she poisoned him and watched my father die! I was there— I watched my father die! At least Sukie tried to swim out and save him—I gave up, ran away, back to the towels.

  O car-bolic faithless, he sang in his head, echoing Sukie’s old misremembered Christmas carol.

  He was suddenly sure that Sukie had all along remembered some of that day, possibly a lot of it. Her drinking (“What you can’t remember can’t hurt you”), her celibacy, and her final feverish attempt to force Pete into bed and have sex with him after he had confronted her with the lies she had told to Judy Nording—even her eventual suicide—must, it seemed to him now as he screwed the Ford coil onto the surface of the desk, have been results of her remembering that day.

  By midafternoon the assembly had been wired and screwed down and propped up across the desktop, and the carborundum bulb was plugged in. Edison pointed out that when the evacuated bulb warmed up, the line of its brushy interior discharge would be sensitive to the motion of any person in the room, so they ran wires around the doorway and into Bradshaw’s little fluorescent-lit kitchen, and set up the chalk-cylinder speaker assembly on the counter by the sink, with a rewired old telephone on a TV table in the middle of the floor. Sullivan had ceremoniously slid a kitchen chair up in front of it.

  Elizalde had made a steaming, eye-watering tea of mint leaves and tequila in a saucepan on the old white-enameled stove, and had turned off the flame when all the liquid had boiled away and the leaves had cooked nearly dry. She and Johanna were standing by the stove, hemmed in by the wires trailing across the worn linoleum floor.

  Elizalde’s eyes were big and empty when she looked up at Sullivan, and he thought he must look the same way. “When you’re ready,” she said, “Johanna and I will go light the candles in the other room, and splash the vente aquí oil around. Then we should disconnect any smoke alarms, and I’ll turn on this stove burner again, high, under this pot of yerra vuena. You want to be talking into the smoke from it.”

  Sullivan had been making sure to take each emptied beer can to the trash before furtively opening the next, so that Elizalde wouldn’t be able to count them. O rum key, O ru-um key to O-bliv-ion, he sang shrilly in his head.

  He took the latest beer into the office, which was very dark now that Bradshaw had unplugged the television set and carried it out to one of the garages, and he pried the can open quietly as he checked the discharge in the carborundum bulb. The bulb had indeed warmed up, and the ghostly blue wisp of electrons was cu
rling against the inside of the glass, silently shifting its position as he moved across the carpet.

  “I guess we’re ready,” he said, sidling back into the bright lit kitchen past Bradshaw, who was standing in the doorway.

  CHAPTER 39

  “She must be sent as a message by the telegraph—”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass

  “I DON’T REMEMBER THE old man’s number,” Bradshaw said. “We could call the reference desk at a library, from a regular phone, I guess.”

  “I know the number,” said Sullivan.

  Running and running, he thought, running with Sukie since 1959, and then running extra fast and alone since 1986. All over the country. To wind up here, now, in this shabby kitchen, staring at a gutted old black bakelite telephone. “It’s April Fool’s Day, 1898.”

  He looked at Elizalde. “My father’s birthday. That and his full name will be his telephone number.” He looked down at the rotary dial on the telephone. The old man would be summoned by dialing April the first, 1898, A-R-T-H-U-R—P-A-T-R-I-C-K—S-U-L-L-I-V-A-N.

  Slowly, looking at the rotary dial, he read off, “411898, 278487-7287425-78554826.”

  “A lot of numbers,” said Kootie, and Sullivan thought it might actually be the boy talking.

  “It’s very long distance,” he said.

  “I remember I always thought God’s phone number was Et cum spiri 2-2-oh,” said Elizalde nervously. “From the Latin mass, you know? Et cum spiritu tuo.”

  “You can call Him after I’m done talking to my dad.”

  “Can magical calls out of here be traced?” asked Bradshaw suddenly.

  Kootie cleared his throat. “Sure,” he said. The boy was sitting up on the kitchen counter beside the chalk cylinder, which had been mounted on the stripped frame of an electric pencil sharpener; he was pale, and his narrow chest was rising and falling visibly. Sweat was running in shiny lines down over his stomach, and the bandage over his ribs on the right side was spotted with fresh blood. “You’ve got—what, three? four?—antennas sitting around in this kitchen, and they do broadcast as well as receive.”