Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  But he could still remember laying his weary body down and closing his eyes and letting sleep take him, remember awakening in darkness and seeing by a luminous clock face that there were hours yet to sleep, remember drifting to wakefulness on sunny mornings with the images of dreams still dissolving before his eyes as he stretched and threw back the covers.

  After seventeen years, he wasn’t sure he remembered what dreams were, any more than he really remembered what the sensations of taste had been like. Dreams had been … visions, it seemed to him now, like vivid daydreams over which one had little or no control; scary sometimes, it was true—but also, as he recalled, sometimes achingly erotic, sometimes luminous with a wrenching beauty that seemed to hint of some actual heaven somewhere. And in dreams he had been able to talk and laugh again with people he’d loved who had died.

  His hand was on Kootie’s bony shoulder, propelling the boy toward the main building.

  When they had both stepped up into the dark office, Bradshaw ducked into the kitchen to fetch Elizalde’s pint bottle of tequila, which was still more than half full.

  “You’re how old?” he asked gruffly.

  “Eighty-four,” said Kootie.

  “Old enough to have a drink.” Bradshaw actually took an involuntary breath. “If you’d like one.”

  “A shot won’t hurt the boy,” assented Kootie. “It seems I’ve acquired a taste for the stuff, since my expiration.”

  You ghosts always do, thought Bradshaw as he poured a liberal slosh of the yellow liquor into a Flintstones glass.

  “You’re not going to have any?” asked Kootie alertly.

  “Oh,” said Bradshaw, “sure. I’ve just got to find a cup for myself.” On a bookshelf he found one of the coffee cups from which he’d been drinking his Eat-’Em-&-Weep Balls tea, and he poured an ounce of tequila in on top of the red stickiness.

  Kootie raised his glass, but waited until Bradshaw had tipped up his coffee cup and taken a mouthful of the tequila.

  What do I do now, thought Bradshaw—swallow it?

  He glanced up at Kootie, who hadn’t even taken a sip yet. Bradshaw sighed and swallowed, feeling the volatile coldness in his throat and trying to remember what tequila tasted like. Pepper and turpentine, as far as he could recall.

  That will do, he thought. I suppose that stuff will just sit in my stomach until it … evaporates? Soaks into my dead tissues like a marinade? For the next day or two, he thought seriously, I’ll have to be careful about burping around any open flame.

  Flame, he thought, and he remembered those cases of “spontaneous combustion” that had occurred when a newly dead person experienced an emotional trauma. In a number of the cases, the person had been drinking alcohol.

  He put down the cup. “I’m too old for tequila,” he said. He inhaled, feeling again the chill of the fast-evaporating alcohol in his mouth. “I’ll be regretting even just that one sip.”

  Edison took another swallow from his glass. “Well, I’m eighty-four years old, but I’m working with an eleven-year-old stomach. The boy will probably sleep through until morning, so another drink or two will do no harm. I’ve got something to celebrate anyway.”

  Too weary to speak, Bradshaw raised his eyebrows.

  “I received a Bachelor of Science degree on Sunday.”

  Bradshaw couldn’t imagine what Edison was talking about, but he nodded ponderously as he reached for the bottle to refill Kootie’s glass. “That’s good.” He sucked air into his lungs. “A college degree can make all the difference in the world.”

  There was a broader lake in a shallow green meadow on the north side of the cemetery lane, and its water was still enough that Sullivan could clearly see the vertical reflections of the tall palms on the far shore. There were two more palm trees reflected in the water than there were standing on the shore.

  Marble benches stood here and there on the grass slope, and there seemed to be figures sitting on every one. Some stared at Sullivan and Elizalde, while others silently went through the motions of talking or laughing, and a couple were bent over notebooks, perhaps writing poetry. Sullivan supposed that one or two of them might be living people who saw this place as solitary.

  Past the urns and markers and statues he hurried, holding Elizalde’s free hand as they made their way down the slope. Around the north curve of the shore, only a few hundred feet ahead, he could see another rectangle of broken white stones, and he was sure that his father’s grave was very near there.

  He and Elizalde were striding along the shoreline now to stay away from the ghosts on the slope, though the animate palm fronds swam in closer to them, creaking woodenly in eerily good imitation of the grumble of ducks. Rope-wide grooves were curled and looped across the muddy bottom of the shallow lake, as if big worms had been foraging earlier in the day.

  Sullivan blinked around at the marble-studded slopes, and he sniffed the chilly jasmined air—then realized that it was a sound that he had become aware of, a low vibration as if a lot of people hiding behind the nearer stones and trees were humming the same bass note.

  Clustered red water lilies hid the lake floor at this north end of the lake, and his father’s grave was just on the far side of a bushy gray-green juniper that overhung the water.

  “Got to go back up the slope for just a few steps,” he said tightly, “to get around this shrubbery.”

  “I’d rather wade across,” whispered Elizalde.

  He thought about the worm tracks, and for a moment he wondered if there even was a bottom right here, under the blanket of water lilies. “It’s just a few steps,” he said, tugging her uphill around the juniper. Two ghosts were pirouetting on the Cecil B. DeMille crypts, but no one was paying any evident attention to Sullivan and Elizalde.

  Back down beside the water on the far side, he saw that a knee-high white statue of the Virgin Mary had been propped up on the rectangle of white stones, with red flowers in the little stone hands and a black cloth hood tied around the head.

  Jayne Mansfield’s etched pink cenotaph lay at the feet of the stone Virgin; the surface of the marker had apparently once had a reproduction of Mansfield’s face bonded to it, but the image had been crudely chipped off. In the shadows under the juniper Sullivan could see a couple of empty cans of King Cobra malt liquor and a dozen white candles in a clear plastic bag.

  Off a few steps to the east of Mansfield’s marker lay a low black-marble square that, from the way its placement jibed with his thirty-three-year-old memories, must be the one that would have his father’s name on it.

  Kootie’s head seemed to be bobbing in time to a slow pulse, and Bradshaw stood up and fetched a jar from the kitchen. It was a Smucker’s orange-marmalade jar, scraped nearly empty.

  “How’re you doing,” he said as he plodded back into the office with it. “Mr. Edison.”

  Kootie was frowning intently, and the expression made him even look like an old man, in the dim sunlight that filtered in through the lantana branches clustered outside the windows. “I’m afraid,” he said with evident care, “that I’ve stuck poor Kootie with … what I trust will be … the first hangover of his life.”

  Bradshaw knew that if his flesh had still been alive, his hand would have trembled as he held out the marmalade jar. “Best thing for the boy would be,” he said. There was no heartbeat in his chest, but it should have been knocking. “For you to get sick now, while the booze is still. Undigested. Cough yourself out into this jar. The boy will feel better for it.”

  “There never has been a vacuum produced in this country that approached anywhere near the vacuum which is necessary for me,” said Edison, articulating each syllable meticulously with Kootie’s mouth. “A hundred-thousandth of an atmosphere was enough to let the filament burn. I need to find my vacuum.”

  “This jar is evacuated,” said Bradshaw. “Hop in. You’ve had too much to drink. Carry the hangover into the jar. To free the boy.”

  “Physicists and sphinxes in majestical mists. Nothing
wrong with my … sibilant syllables.” Kootie’s eyes were half closed.

  “Dammit,” said Bradshaw. “Mr. Edison. Exhale yourself. Get in the jar.”

  But Kootie’s chin wobbled downward, lifted once with a questioning whine, then dropped to his chest. A hoarse snore blew out through the boy’s lips, but Bradshaw knew it was just breath, not Edison’s ghost.

  “Mr. Edison,” said Bradshaw, his voice droning flatly as he tried to speak louder. “Wake up. It’s just a hop, skip, and a sigh. To bed.”

  Kootie was unconscious, though, and didn’t stir even when Bradshaw reached out to nudge his head with the empty jar.

  Bradshaw’s face was immobile, but a red tear ran down his gray cheek as he set the jar carefully on the cleared-off desk.

  Horribly, there still was something he could do.

  ARTHUR PATRICK SULLIVAN

  “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”

  1898–1959

  Sullivan waved a circling gnat away from his face and stared down at his father’s gravestone. He was tightly holding Elizalde’s hand.

  His father’s stone had a picture attached, too; a playing-card-sized greened-brass plaque with an engraving of the old man’s face etched on it. Sullivan recognized the smiling likeness; it was from a Fox Studios publicity still taken in the forties.

  The breeze paused, and when it came back it was chillier. The palm-frond swans scudded away toward the ring of fountain jets that stuck up above the surface of the water; Sullivan had at first glance thought the nozzles were a cluster of baby ducklings, and perhaps they still appeared so to the creaking frond-birds.

  Sullivan released Elizalde’s hand, crouched, and touched the inset plaque—and it was loose, simply resting in the shallow rectangular recess in the stone. He pried it out with a fingernail and stood up again, tucking it into his shirt pocket and retaking hold of Elizalde’s hand.

  Sullivan’s mouth was dry and tasted of pennies. When he began to speak, he found that his voice had a rusty flippancy: “So where are you, Dad?” he asked, aware that Elizalde was listening. “We want to be on the road before the evening traffic gets heavy.”

  The breeze twitched at his hair, and then a small voice in his ear said, “Call me Fishmeal.”

  Sullivan didn’t move. The voice might be that of any random ghost. He seemed to remember that the line was from the beginning of Moby Dick.

  “On the freeways,” the voice went on, “there you feel free.”

  Sullivan’s heart was suddenly beating hard enough to shake his shoulders. That phrase was familiar—it was something his father had always said to the twins, though the old man had only lived to see the earliest of the Southern California superhighways—the 110 to South Pasadena, and the one that he had always stubbornly gone on calling the Ramona Freeway, though it had been renamed the San Bernardino Freeway four years before he died.

  Sullivan’s mouth opened, but all the things there were to say overwhelmed him, and he just exhaled a descending “Ssshhhhh.”

  “You’re a good boy,” said the tiny buzzing voice, “and I know you won’t slap me, even though I am an insect.”

  Sullivan’s hand was cold and shaking in Elizalde’s, and he guessed that she was looking at him in concern, but he held his head still.

  “What kind of insect?” he whispered.

  “Good, then you don’t—” began the voice—

  But it was interrupted by the wailing hyena laughter from the shadowy trees.

  Elizalde’s free hand gripped his, hard. “It’s that laughing bag,” she whimpered. “The thing Kootie and I saw today—the thing that spoke on the phone.”

  “Swing south,” buzzed the voice, “past Fairbanks to the Paramount wall, there’s a tunneling effect there, the field of the movies overlaps a bit and blurs things; then just cut north to the entrance.”

  “Back the way we came,” said Sullivan, pulling Elizalde away from the juniper bush and the stone Virgin. “But we can go around this other side of the lake.”

  “What about your father?”

  “He’s in my ear,” Sullivan told her. And he remembered the scene in the railway carriage in Through the Looking-Glass, and he added with weary certainty, “He’s a gnat.”

  Elizalde obviously hadn’t understood what he had said, but let herself be hurried along up the east shore of the lake.

  Trying to run smoothly so as not to jar his head and possibly dislodge his father, Sullivan nevertheless kept glancing across the lake, toward the setting sun. The figures on the far-side slope were beginning to fragment; an old woman would take a tottering step and then abruptly be a child running, and a figure on a bench would close a book and stand up and suddenly be two figures. One pedestrian became a motorcycle and rider, and silently sped away over the grass, bounding over gravestones as if they were hurdles.

  Up by the Cathedral Mausoleum, Sullivan and Elizalde crossed the grass through a cluster of stones with Armenian names, each of which had an unlit candle in front of it and a dish for burning incense, and then they had sprinted across the road and were hurrying past the west side of the mausoleum, toward the stairs above the lake grave of Douglas Fairbanks.

  “Scuttle fast and low through the little valley past these stairs,” Sullivan whispered, “and then when we’re among the trees—”

  A sudden, shocking racket from the west slope of the Douglas Fairbanks lake made them both instantly crouch and bare their teeth—it was a loud metallic squealing drowned out by idiot laughter.

  A thing was flapping toward them from the trees beyond the road to the west, about ten feet above the grass and muscling its way rapidly through the twilight air; it flexed through a slanting beam of golden sunlight, and Sullivan saw that it had long metal wings but its body was a swinging burlap bag with a baseball cap bobbing on top.

  Elizalde’s razory scream seemed to shake leaves out of the overhanging willow branches, and she let go of Houdini’s plaster right hand—and it disappeared.

  Sullivan’s hand was abruptly empty too; but when he glanced down he saw that he was wearing a black formal jacket with white shirt cuffs just visible at his wrists.

  And then he felt the sleeves of the jacket snap loose above the elbows when the jacket and pants twisted him to his left, toward the stone stairs that led down to the lake.

  “Whoa, Nellie!” buzzed Sullivan’s father in his ear.

  Elizalde too had turned toward the stairs. She was shorter suddenly, and plump, and her hair was up in a wide bun above the high collar of her lacy white blouse; but the eyes in the unfamiliar round face were Elizalde’s brown eyes, and white showed all the way around the irises.

  “It’s the mask,” said Sullivan jerkily as he found himself scuffing down the stone steps toward the water. “Relax and go with it—I think we’re about to start wading.”

  His unfamiliar shoes stepped right off the bottom step into the warm water, and sank to the ankles in silt; then his long shirtsleeves pulled his arms forward and he was diving.

  He braced himself to land flat and not strike his knees or elbows on the bottom—but there was no bottom, and he was swimming breathlessly in choppy cold water. Cold salt water.

  He gasped in sudden shock, stiff with vertigo even though he was supported by the water. He didn’t know where he was, or even if he was still conscious and not hallucinating.

  The splashing of his clumsy strokes was echoed back to him by a close wall which was not the wall of the Cathedral Mausoleum but, only yards away, the vertical black steel hull of a ship too vast to be comprehended from way down here.

  Someone on a deck far above cried, “Get out of town!”

  Sullivan could hear Elizalde splashing along next to him, but in the quickly lowering darkness he couldn’t see her. Some current kept bumping him against the steel hull of the ship and bumping Elizalde against him, even when they both swam sharply out away from it—and then he heard a metallic boom as Elizalde collided with a wall on her side; apparently th
e two of them were now swimming through some narrow channel.

  And the walls were sharply concave now, curling up around him. The light was gone, and Sullivan’s knees had somehow got jammed up under his chin by the rounded metal that was now underneath him too.

  He was shivering violently at the speed and force of whatever was happening—but then it stopped, and he was encapsulated underwater, in darkness.

  He could feel the struggling bony pressure of Elizalde crowding hard at his back, and he knew that she was being tightly constricted by the wall on her side. They were completely submerged in solid water now, with no smallest pocket of air.

  A metal floor was shoved up against Sullivan’s shoes, and the echoes of his scraping soles told him that there was a lid very close over his head. He and Elizalde had got trapped inside some kind of closed cylinder full of water. Sullivan’s ear canals chugged and bubbled as they were icily filled, and his heart hammered at the mental image of his father lost again under seawater.

  Sullivan reached out to push against the wall in front of his face, and he felt tightly ratcheted handcuffs cut into the skin of his wrists. Elizalde was thrashing furiously against his back.

  With her shaking him, he couldn’t even get his legs under himself to batter his head against the lid, and he was about to lose the breath that was clenched inside his lungs by blowing it all out in a helpless scream—when he became aware that his hands were busy.

  His right hand had dug in the kinky hair over his ear and pulled free something that felt like a hairpin; and his fingers now worked carefully as they straightened the bit of wire. He knew that they were working more slowly and carefully because one finger was now missing.

  He managed to nudge Elizalde in the back of her ribs with his left elbow, hoping the gesture conveyed, Hold still!

  Then the fingers had deftly poked the wire into the receiver slot of the left cuff, between the close cowl and the knurled outer side of the swing arm, and, without letting go of the wire, his fingers had gripped the sides of the cuff and compressed it painfully tighter—and a moment later the swing arm had sprung back out, and his left wrist was freed. His left hand took the wire then, and, with all of its fingers to work with, freed his right wrist even more quickly.