Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  He stretched, rotating his head on his stiff neck, then finally wheeled his bicycle out from behind the van—but before he could start toward the elevator a cheerful voice spoke from the phone in his shirt pocket.

  “Are you going home?” it asked. Ragotskie recognized it as the automated voice of the Waze app, and he hastily fumbled the phone to his ear. “Turn right on Broadway,” the voice said. “In one hundred feet, turn right on Eighth Street.”

  Two seconds later he heard the chime of Agnes’ phone.

  “Yo, Simon,” said her voice then. The burner TracFone in the map pocket of her passenger side door was picking her up clearly.

  The calm voice of the Waze app interjected, “Turn right on Eighth Street.”

  “That’s just Waze,” said Agnes’ voice. Ragotskie could clearly hear th ticking of her turn signal. “Listen, I could text him. Even if he did see Foster, he’ll still agree to meet me. I’ll make up some explanation, and he’ll believe it. He’s in love with me.” Her tone was only amused.

  Ragotskie carefully laid his thumb over the tiny microphone slot. Then he let himself take a hitching breath.

  “In one mile, turn left to the 110 freeway south,” advised the Waze voice.

  “I know,” said Agnes’ voice now, “the sock. I’ll get it back from him.” After a few seconds she said, “The twins? Instead of Vickery and Castine? Uh—hah!—are you sure?” She was silent for several seconds, then went on, “I know, but—well, okay, you’re our Pygmalion here. How’s young Pratt? I hear Vickery knocked him out, at Canter’s.” For several seconds she didn’t speak; then she said, “Good God. Open his skull?” Again she was silent, while Waze droned on about the freeway. “Okay,” Agnes said at last, “bye for now.”

  Ragotskie heard her phone thump on the passenger seat, and then the rasp of a cigarette lighter.

  The twins? he thought in dismay. No, he can’t—if he uses them as his IMPs, I have no hope of having accomplished anything. I’ve only made it worse—Agnes will still lose her identity in the egregore, but now its IMPs will be the delusional and capricious Amber and Lexi. Imps for real.

  He could see Harlowe’s reasoning. The twins did have the useful quality of diffraction—nobody, including the girls themselves, could tell which of them was which, or where one personality ended and the other began. Merged into the egregore, they should in theory find no difficulty in rapidly switching the group-mind’s theses and antitheses back and forth through their uniquely open-ended identity.

  But they weren’t sane.

  The Waze app spoke up, advising her to make a left turn onto the freeway. Ragotskie made a mental note of the route she was taking, though it would be the last couple of turns and street names that would be important. And when he had learned what street she lived on, he would again take the battery out of his Samsung.

  After more than a minute her voice said, “Move it, shithead!”

  Apparently she was addressing another driver. Waze continued to indicate directions, but it occurred to Ragotskie that Move it, shithead might be the last words he would ever hear Agnes Loria say.

  More than a hundred miles to the northeast, out in the desert beyond the Cajon Pass, Ingrid Castine finally fell asleep in Vickery’s single bed.

  For an hour she had lain awake in the darkness, listening to the faint buzz of the pinwheels on the trailer’s roof, and listening too, in her mind, to what she had said to Vickery this afternoon: Socrates said the unconsidered life is not worth living, but that’s what I want. Wanted.

  She wondered where the old house in their visions might be, and she tried to remember what echo vision had been like, before the views of the house had pre-empted it. Even then, she had resented the intrusion of the past.

  She didn’t like to consider the past at all. Nor the future, really.

  Last year her deceased fiancé had knowingly directed her into a trap, because he’d been threatened with disbarment and possible tax-fraud charges if he did not. He had reacted as her pursuers had known he would—he had thought to save himself a lot of bad trouble by betraying her—though in fact they had killed him in spite of his contemptible cooperation.

  She fell asleep thinking of him, wondering if his ghost had been in the afterworld Labyrinth when she and Vickery had been there alive. The two of them had escaped in a makeshift hang-glider and closed the conduit between that insane world and the normal one—had they sealed his ghost in, on that side?

  Would she have wanted instead to subsume his ghost in some unliving organic object on this side, like the bits of bone or wood in the hubs of the pinwheels, or the book in which Vickery’s nonexistent daughter was fossilized?

  In her dream she hovered over an enormous open book, and she could see that its pages were filled with columns of what she knew were names, though their letters were too blurred and overlapped to be readable. And she knew that she could relax and merge into the pages, and that her name, itself safely indecipherable there, would be all that remained of her. Not just the unexamined life, but the unconscious life; the unlife life, in fact.

  The book’s pages fluttered as if in a randomizing wind, and it rose upright and was a pinwheel, spinning in bright moonlight. She drifted toward its hub, knowing that she could dance unaware in it forever, but she glanced sideways—other pinwheels stood nearby, and though they were spinning, she was able to recognize faces in the hubs—Jack Hipple, yes, . . . but also the girl who had stopped her bicycle and spoken a cryptical phrase at MacArthur Park this afternoon, and Supergirl . . . and the faces were all contorted in imbecilic grimaces.

  She recoiled into wakefulness, and after a few panicky moments remembered where she was. She though of getting up and going to the living room and waking Vickery, but the memory of the dream had faded to a few meaningless images. She fluffed the pillow and rolled over and went back to sleep.

  CHAPTER SIX:

  How You Get Out of Your Way

  At 6 AM Vickery had tucked the .45 into his belt and trudged around the trailer park and looked up and down the road, but the cars in the park were all familiar, and there were no vehicles stopped alongside the road for as far as he could see. The October wind had still been cool over the desert, and he had gone back to the trailer and opened all the windows and turned on fans to blow the stale air out. Finally he had carried gloves and a whiskbroom and dustpan out to the Saturn and punched out the remaining glass in the two back windows and swept out the interior, and had then gone in to wash the dishes and make breakfast.

  He was standing by the stove, turning sizzling strips of bacon in a pan, when he felt warmer air puff in through the kitchen window, so he took the pan off the burner and closed the window, then went around taking fans down and sliding windows shut in the utility area and the living room. The bedroom door was closed, and he was reluctant to knock, though he would have to as soon as the bacon and eggs were ready.

  But Castine came shuffling into the kitchen as he was using the rim of a tumbler to cut disks out of the middles of two slices of sourdough bread.

  “I smell coffee,” she said, squinting at him.

  He poured a cup and stepped past her to set it on the table. “Milk and sugar are already out. Silverware is in the basket by the condiments.”

  She stirred two spoonfuls of sugar into the coffee and took a sip. “What are you cutting holes in bread for?”

  “It’s Guy Kibbee eggs.” He forked the bacon strips out onto paper towels, lifted the pan and poured most of the grease into a jar, then laid the slices of bread in the pan and broke an egg into the hole in the middle of each one. “I’ll flip ’em in a minute. You get your egg and toast all in one piece, see.”

  She nodded grudgingly and had another sip of coffee. “You’ve looked around?”

  Vickery refilled his own cup from the pot. “Yes, just after dawn.” He shrugged. “Evidently nobody could see us over the curvature of the earth.”

  “The way you live out here,” she said. “It’s as if you’v
e been marking time. Waiting.”

  He was mildly startled. “It could look that way, yes.”

  “I suppose I’ve been doing the same, after all.” She set down her cup and ran her fingers through her disordered hair. “It’s a long drive to LAX.”

  “Ontario airport is just eighty miles south. Hour and a half drive, even with a stop at Hesperia to retrieve your stuff from the bus station locker.”

  “Oh.” She yawned. “We should check flights, I suppose.”

  Vickery flipped the slices of bread. The top sides now were browned, and the eggs in the middles were white with yellow centers. “Can’t do it here. I’ve got no computer or smart phone.”

  “Time yet for a hundred indecisions,” she said, “and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of Guy Kibbee eggs and coffee.” She looked up at him. “That’s T.S. Eliot, except for the eggs and coffee.”

  Vickery laid bacon strips on two plates, then slid the egg-and-toast slices alongside. He carried them to the table and went back for his coffee, and when he sat down he said, “Indecisions?”

  “And visions!—and revisions.” She had found a knife and fork in the basket of mismatched silverware, and cut into her fried bread. “What was it Laquedem said last night? Right after ‘it’s on a boat’—something about ‘a crowd of people falling into the black hole.’”

  “That’s what he said. He didn’t say anything about it.”

  Castine nodded and shook Tabasco and then salt onto her cut-up egg. “That guy shot that woman, in the wrecked-house vision last night.”

  “Echo vision. A time-spike. As you said, it probably happened a long time ago.”

  “Imagine if we tried to tell the police about it—‘In a hallucination we saw a woman get killed somewhere, sometime.’” She took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. She swallowed, and said, “But it did happen. I wonder who she was. Who he was.”

  “No way of telling.”

  “Probably not. Old betrayals.” Castine glanced past him at the kitchen counter, where the bottle of Maker’s Mark still stood, visibly depleted. “It would be a mistake to fortify this coffee.”

  He rocked his head, considering. “You don’t need to be very sober just to get on an airplane.”

  “If we do get on an airplane.” She put down her knife and fork. “Last night we were closer to the old house than we’ve ever been; and did you see the motorcycle’s shadow? It was longer, it’s late afternoon on that day now. That long day. And the killer said he took that woman’s blood pressure, which is the same phrase that poor girl on the bicycle used—and she was pretty clearly channeling the crowd that was chasing us yesterday.” She gave him a quizzical look. “And they’ve got your daughter.”

  He smiled wryly across the table at Castine. “My fossil daughter. You don’t want to get on an airplane.”

  “Do you? I was awake a long time last night, thinking. Why do we keep seeing that old house, now, instead of our recent local pasts like before? I don’t want to see what happens there when the sun’s down. And I’m afraid I will, if these things are allowed to take their course. And—a lot of people falling into a black hole.”

  Vickery turned his head to look at the bottle, then looked around at the interior of his trailer, noting the crowded bookshelves and the framed Maxfield Parrish prints in the living room, and the hole in the wall over the washing machine where he’d had to get at some pipes, and which he’d been meaning to patch. “I guess I wasn’t really considering leaving—not really. I guess I pictured escorting you to a departure gate and then . . . ”

  She nodded. “Driving back to L.A.”

  “Well, yeah, I do want to talk to Galvan.”

  “And we’ve got a date at four with Supergirl. You gave her a thousand dollars!”

  Vickery tore off a piece of the fried bread to mop up some egg yolk. For several seconds he just chewed, then took a sip of coffee and said, “Okay. We don’t fly away, we go back down into L.A. and try to get a handle on this stuff. That’s about a two-hour drive.”

  “We’ve got plenty of time. I’m glad to see you’ve got a shower in your bathroom, and—if I can borrow some money?—I’ll want to stop at that outlet mall below town for some fresh clothes.”

  Vickery was chewing a strip of bacon, and nodded.

  After they’d finished eating and the breakfast things were cleared away, Vickery went outside to check the tire pressures and oil and coolant levels on the car. When he came back in, Castine was washing the dishes.

  She looked up. “Okay if I hang onto your .38?”

  The question made their plan immediate, and depressed him. “I guess you may as well. Get a big purse. The gun’s registered—to Bill Ardmore—but you’re on your own if a cop should catch you with a concealed gun and no CCW permit.”

  “That’s a misdemeanor, as I recall. I think we’ve got bigger worries.”

  “I guess we do.” Vickery looked out the kitchen window at the desert, then back at Castine. “I’ll fill a couple of speed-loaders and magazines and put ’em in the trunk. And I should crawl under the trailer and get another pocketful of cash.”

  Out past the Long Beach breakwater, the 45-foot Hatteras increased her speed, surging west across the twenty-mile expanse of glittering blue sea between Santa Catalina Island and Point Vicente, and her shallow keel cut smoothly across the low waves. The twin V-6 diesel engines hummed in perfect synchronization, and the hull was cored with balsa wood between the fiberglass layers, so in the boat’s interior the engines and the water rushing past the hull outside were muted enough that the passengers had quickly stopped being aware of them.

  In the lounge, the view forward was blocked by cabinets Harlowe had installed, and Lexi and Amber were kneeling on the long couch, sipping from plastic cups of root beer and peering out through the starboard windows. They were absorbed in the view, communicating only in excited squeaks and brief, sung bass notes. Simon Harlowe sat on a padded bench below the windows in the opposite bulkhead, staring at the girls.

  They were his brother’s twin daughters, and Harlowe had adopted them after the death of both their parents in what the district attorney had concluded was a tandem suicide.

  For decades the brothers had had no contact at all, and although they had renewed their acquaintance two years ago, they hadn’t ever been close. Chris Harlowe had graduated respectably enough from Cal Poly and ended up doing tech writing for Apple. Simon Harlowe, on the other hand, had been a boy genius who got involved in computers in 1972 by way of the computer center at Stanford University. He enrolled in the university in 1973, at the age of sixteen, and for a year he had even worked at the Stanford Research Institute—but his theoretical extrapolations, linking computer networking with neurology and occult philosophy, had isolated him, and he had left without getting a degree. By the ’80s he’d been living on the outskirts of Salinas, subsisting on food stamps, in an old trailer equipped with a TRS-80 computer and stacks of books and charts and floppy disks.

  The only intimate contact he’d had with anyone during that period had been when he had killed a vagrant who broke into the trailer one night. The incident had been ruled a justifiable homicide, but the effect on Harlowe had for a number of reasons been devastating, and when he had eventually found a psychological equilibrium it was by means of projecting a personality that was constructed, artificial—almost theatrical—though he pursued his researches even more monomaniacally for the next twenty years.

  His mother had died at some point, and his long-estranged father died, somewhere, in 2015, when Simon Harlowe was fifty-eight; and, because they had invested widely in real estate, he was suddenly a millionaire.

  The inheritance had led to a reunion with his brother—and had also led to Simon’s fortuitous discovery of Chris’ twin daughters. Simon chose to imagine that his manipulatively avuncular relationship with the girls had been, or would ultimately be, beneficial to them. Even the traditionally-horrifying crime he had subtly encouraged them to
commit would, he believed, prove to have been a step in their salvation.

  “You girls feeling . . . all right?” he asked them now. They had both been seasick the first time they’d been out on the boat, though he later concluded that it had only been because he had warned them that it might happen.

  They ignored him, humming and squeaking in unison now as they stared out the window at the sea. Harlowe shivered.

  The girls had apparently always been difficult. They had been tentatively diagnosed as borderline personalities, and after the deaths of their parents a doctor had put them on Prozac; after which they had immediately attempted to drown themselves off Little Coyote Point in the San Francisco Bay.

  Harlowe had very soon guessed at their possible usefulness as IMPs in his planned egregore—and he really believed that incorporation into that transcendent group-mind would be the best possible resolution of their problems. They were more one person than two—hardly even one, really—and their moods changed as often as winning numbers on a roulette wheel. In the group-mind of the egregore, they would, like himself and Agnes Loria, and even rogue Elisha Ragotskie—and ultimately everyone!—be just semiconductors in the mind of God.

  Eventually he had initiated the twins, using the costly fifty-year-old coloring books.

  Harlowe leaned back on the bench, rocking with the motion of the boat, and closed his eyes. Tomorrow night the long-delayed apotheosis would happen, and he would lose his unwanted identity forever.

  For decades he had been tracing indications—in early issues of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, and the Los Angeles Free Press—that a group-mind egregore had been attempted in Los Angeles in the ’60s. It proved to have been the project of a charismatic young hippie musician known as Conrad Chronic, who had got hold of a suppressed hieroglyph embodying the Egyptian god—or force, or psychic polarizer—called Ba. Chronic had printed the hieroglyph, surrounded by disguising random lines, on a back page of Groan, an underground coloring book otherwise full of satirical black-and-white cartoons with captions like Color Him Racist and Six Uses For My Draft Card. The Ba image in the coloring book had been Chronic’s covert recruiting tool. The cult had reportedly included some never-named celebrities among its mostly itinerant and drug-addled membership; but it had failed to achieve coherence, and had violently fallen apart at a gathering in 1968, an event commemorated in a B-side ballad, “Elegy in a Seaside Meadow,” by the rock group Fogwillow. On a morbid-nostalgia website Harlowe had seen a couple of photographs of Chronic at a place called Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco on Sunset Boulevard in 1967, but he was unable to find any other pictures of the man.