Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  “And you’re going to have to report your Tahoe as stolen,” Taitz was saying into the phone. “Vickery shot out both front tires and put a round through the windshield—in addition to shooting my hand. No way Foster and I were going to hang around and talk to cops. No, listen, we’re at some kind of Mexican laundromat at Eighth and Mariposa, you gotta send a car here to take me to an emergency room.” He listened for a few moments, then said, “What? I don’t care, I want real doctors! Yes, Ragotskie led us to both of them, he sure did, and a lot of good it did us. He’s with them now, somehow—they all three drove off together in his car.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out shudderingly. “Who is this Vickery guy? He could have killed both of us, but he just . . . disabled us. Oh, and he sicced a ghost on us! Yes! I think it was Pratt, the damn thing froze my window with its tongue, broke the glass. I don’t know, when we cornered Ragotskie and Castine and him, he just conjured the thing out of thin air! It came at us like some kind of mad dog! And then he started shooting!” Taitz listened for a few seconds, then said, “Yes, it did seem to be Pratt. What? It didn’t go anywhere, it just spun around in the air and disappeared!” Taitz moved his injured hand from his chest to his knee. “Shit, this hurts. Get somebody here quick. Oh, another thing—you better move the Black Sheep again, Ragotskie was at that marina last night, according to Foster’s tracking app. I guess he tracked Loria somehow.” Taitz barked one strained syllable of a laugh and said, “Yeah, you too.”

  He touched the screen with his thumb, then switched the phone off and slid it into the pocket of his windbreaker.

  “A ghost did that to your window?” said Foster, wide-eyed. Sweat was running down his bald scalp. “I thought Vickery shot it. Pratt’s ghost? Jesus, I didn’t actually think ghosts were real.”

  Taitz leaned back and wiped his sweating face with his left sleeve. “You were no help. After he shot me, he turned around to go to Ragotskie’s car. You had a clear field of fire. You could have—” He hissed as he moved his wounded hand. “You could have got all three of them.”

  “He shot the windshield! I couldn’t see out.”

  “Shit. You told me—bragged to me!—that last year you killed a guy who tried to steal your winnings, in the parking lot of the Commerce Casino. That’s right by the 5 Freeway, definitely inside the current. But—you didn’t see Pratt’s ghost just now.”

  “Oh. Yeah, well—everything happened so fast—and Vickery was in the way—”

  “You’ve never killed anybody, and I bet you’ve never even been to that casino.”

  “The freeway was closed down that day—yeah, remember, a big semi jackknifed—”

  Taitz was about to give a scornful reply, but paused when the woman who had sold him the towel came shuffling to the chairs he and Foster were sitting in.

  “For a ghost that follows you,” she said diffidently, “you need to change how you look, to it. You are right-handed? Good, the bandages will make you do everything different from usual. Get shoes that belonged to someone else—”

  “Get lost, chiquita,” snapped Foster, but Taitz raised his good hand.

  “Shut up,” he said to Foster; and to the woman he said, “Go on.”

  “Shoes from a thrift store,” the woman said, “so the ghost won’t know your footsteps. Wear your shirts facing backward. You wear no rings—get a ring, two rings, from the thrift store—the ghost will maybe see only the shadows of who had them before.”

  She said nothing more, and after a few seconds Taitz said, “Thank you.”

  She nodded, and cocked her head as if to see him better. “You saw it?” It wasn’t really a question.

  “Yes.”

  “Because of the death of someone?”

  Taitz thought of Hannah’s car tumbling over the 101 freeway embankment in 1986.

  “Yes.”

  “May God have mercy on you.”

  Taitz sighed. He and Foster knew, as this woman apparently did too, that people who had committed homicide in the freeway current acquired a certain expanded perspective: the generally unwelcome ability to see ghosts. There were other ways to fall into that ability, but the woman had clearly guessed that murder had been the cause of it in his case; what she had said had been a prayer.

  “Thank you,” he said again, quietly.

  CHAPTER NINE:

  A Splendid and Effective Insanity

  Vickery parked Ragotskie’s green Audi on Normandie, right under a TOW AWAY—NO PARKING ANY TIME sign, hoping it would be towed soon, and then he and Castine walked quickly down an alley and through a parking lot to Irolo Street, where his Saturn was parked. The only consequence of having left all the windows down was that a half-full bag of french fries had been tossed into the back seat.

  Vickery opened the trunk and laid Ragotskie’s envelope beside the jack, and Castine tossed in the old bloodstained sock; and though they rolled up the front windows, they still had to talk loudly when Vickery had got onto the westbound 10 freeway, because of the headwind buffeting in through the two glassless back windows.

  When he found his way to Sepulveda and Venice, the building Ragotskie had told them about was on the northwest corner of the intersection—a one-story stucco structure with a cement ramp up to the front doors, and the ChakraSys logo in bold sans-serif letters between two windows above the doors.

  The parking lot behind the place was empty except for a couple of abandoned-looking sedans and an old Volkswagen van with eyes painted all over it. Vickery parked away from the other vehicles,and when Castine climbed out she tried to comb her disordered hair with her fingers.

  “You’ve got to get some plastic to cover those windows,” she said, speaking for the first time in several minutes.

  “Top of my list,” said Vickery shortly. A green Dumpster stood beside a pile of cardboard file boxes at the back of the building, and he made a mental note to look through it all if the building were indeed unoccupied.

  They walked around to the front, and through the glass doors they saw a wide bare floor and a split drywall partition and wires hanging out of a couple of holes in the walls. Vickery rattled the door, which was, unsurprisingly, locked.

  “Let’s look in the trash,” he said, leading the way back to the parking lot side of the building.

  He flipped a couple of file boxes aside when he saw they were empty and unlabeled—but he jumped backward and sat down hard on the pavement when a white-bearded man suddenly stood up in the Dumpster. Castine had only dropped a box and stepped back.

  The old man in the Dumpster towered over Vickery, his shaggy, bearded head silhouetted against the blue sky. Blinking and scuttling back, Vickery was able to make out that the man was tall, even allowing for the elevation of the Dumpster floor, and his face was sun-darkened under a blowing fringe of white hair. A threadbare gray sportcoat was bunched over his shoulders, and Vickery could see that he wore another coat under that. The collars of both coats, and a blue shirt under them, were all turned up under his beard.

  Vickery got to his feet, and carefully stepped around to the far side of the Dumpster and leaned forward to peer into it. Aside from the old man himself, whose eccentric outfit was completed by bulky corduroy trousers and worn sneakers, the rusty container was empty. The smell from it was like burnt plastic and rotten strawberries.

  The old man had shifted around, his sneakers grating on the metal floor, and he said “I don’t know you,” then looked across at Castine. “Or you either.”

  “No,” agreed Vickery, slapping dust off the seat of his jeans. “We’re not from around here. Do you know where they went?” He waved at the building. “The people who ran ChakraSys?”

  “They went thataway,” said the old man, without moving at all. “You losers. Are your chakras out of order? Grip your heads with your Kegel muscles.”

  “Were you,” Vickery persisted, “around when they were in business?”

  “If they had a business,” said the old man, “they didn’t build tha
t. They were munchkins standing on the shoulders of giant ants.”

  Vickery tried once more. “What did their business do?”

  The old man stood up straight and squared his shoulders as he glared at Vickery, who took a step back from the Dumpster.

  “Do?” the man rumbled. “What does it look like they did? They ran. Have you made a deal with those people? Do you think I can’t fly away? Hah!” He gripped the rim of the Dumpster and began scuffing the inner wall of it with a shoe, apparently intending to climb out.

  Vickery caught Castine’s eye and nodded toward the car. “Uh, thanks anyway!” he called to the struggling old man as he and Castine began walking across the asphalt toward the Saturn.

  Behind them the old man was singing now: “We left behind the old gray shore, climbed to the sky . . . ”

  Back in the car, Vickery started the engine as Castine pulled her door closed. He steered around the colorful old van to a driveway, and made a left turn onto Sepulveda; a few blocks ahead was an onramp onto the 405 freeway, which would take them north to connect to the eastbound 10. Neither of them spoke as he drove past a Subway and a Carl’s Jr.

  Finally, feeling that he ought to say it before Castine did, Vickery said, sheepishly, “Former LAPD officer and Secret Service agent flees from unarmed old lunatic in trash bin.”

  Castine smiled. “He wasn’t a ghost, was he?” she asked.

  Vickery was startled. “Uh—no, his sneakers grated on the Dumpster floor. He was solid. Good thought, though—when he does become a ghost, he won’t have to change much.”

  “I’m glad some of my thoughts are good.”

  Vickery made a right turn and sped up as the short lane curved to join the freeway. “I’m sorry, I’ve been . . . testy, haven’t I? I just feel like this thing is rolling over us. And I don’t even know what it is! Black holes, egregores, imps.”

  “One thing at a time. Right now, Boardner’s, to meet Supergirl.” She looked at her forty-dollar Target watch. “We’ll be early for our appointment with her—we can sit in a back booth and look at the papers Ragotskie says he stole.”

  The wind had started fluttering through the back windows again, and Vickery spoke more loudly. “But then we’ve got to go to that freeway nest—”

  Castine raised her voice too. “After we see what’s in the papers, and after we hear whatever Supergirl might be able to tell us.”

  “Okay, yeah.” He sighed. “You’re right, one thing at a time.” A distantly-remembered tune was playing in his mind, and he whistled a few bars of it.

  Then he sang, softly, “We left behind the old gray shore, climbed to the sky, until we all one burden bore, never to die.” He looked at Castine. “Do you remember that song?”

  “What song?”

  He sang it again, louder.

  She shook her head.

  “It was from the ’60s or ’70s,” he said, “a group called Fogwillow. They were like, I don’t know, Iron Butterfly or Deep Purple. The song was called . . . ‘Elegy in a Seaside Meadow.’”

  “Before my time!”

  “Hey, mine too. I grew up on Guns n’ Roses and Radiohead. But I listened to the old stuff too.”

  “One burden bore,” she said, leaning back. “That’s a line in Poe’s ‘The Raven.’ Gimme a minute.” She moved her lips silently, one finger tapping out meter in the air. “Caught from some unhappy master whose unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster, till his songs one burden bore . . . something something, nevermore.”

  “We recited that in the Labyrinth, last year,” said Vickery; he shook his head at the memory, and went on, “to save our sanity.”

  “In that place,” said Castine, “it was a step in the direction of sanity.”

  “Under the bridge last night,” Vickery went on thoughtfully, “one of the ghosts said, ‘Quoth the raven.’”

  Castine inhaled audibly. “Good Lord, you’re right. I forgot that.”

  “I thought the next word was nevermore, like in the poem, but it might have been—”

  “Egregore,” said Castine. “Maybe we should have talked to that old guy in the Dumpster.”

  “I tried to, remember? And anyway, it was a popular song back then—that old guy probably rotates it with ‘Eve of Destruction’ and ‘Like A Rolling Stone.’”

  Castine shrugged and shook her head.

  “Songs of the time,” explained Vickery. “I think I’ll stay on freeways here, 10 to the 110 to the 101.”

  “Very binary sort of freeways,” Castine observed.

  Vickery laughed. “I wish. Ones and zeroes. But they’re generally fractional, if not downright fractal. Sometimes there’s a lot of free wills moving along them, fast, sometimes a few, sometimes a lot but slow. It’s a bunch of unbalanced forces, fluctuating indeterminism, never in equilibrium. Even without the Labyrinth to fall into anymore, they’re dicey.”

  Castine was gripping the seat belt that crossed her from shoulder to hip. “You figure you’re okay driving? Fast?”

  Vickery opened his mouth, then closed it. “I’d let you drive, but the old-house vision hits you too. We have to travel—if I start to sense two girls on a boat, I’ll swerve straight to the median or the shoulder.”

  “That’s—not a very good plan.”

  “What else is there? We’ve got to get around, and a taxi driver wouldn’t do things we might need to do.”

  Castine was still holding onto the seat belt. “I wish I’d gone to Confession before we got into all this.”

  Vickery got off the 101 at Highland and drove down to make a left turn on Hollywood Boulevard, and he parked in a lot off Las Palmas. Boardner’s was on Cherokee, on the other side of the parking lot. He and Castine rolled the front windows down to match the rear ones, San Francisco style, and he opened the trunk and lifted out Ragotskie’s envelope.

  He handed it to Castine and tucked the car keys between the envelope and her right hand.

  “Wait here by the car,” he said. “I don’t trust Supergirl absolutely. I’m going to go in and order a beer. If I don’t see any bad guys and nothing happens, I’ll come out and salute. If I’m not out in three minutes, or if I step out and make any other gesture, or if anybody seems to pay attention to me and follows me in, toss that in the car and drive away. You know how to drive evasive if you have to, and the bloody sock is in the trunk, so they can’t track you that way anymore. You remember how to get to my place outside Barstow?”

  She nodded, tight-lipped.

  “Go there—evasive!—and I’ll catch up when I can. The trailer key’s on the ring.”

  “I’ve got a gun and I’m trained,” she said, “and we’re allies. Friends, even.”

  She spread the fingers of her right hand, and the keys fell onto the asphalt.

  Vickery stared at her expressionlessly for several seconds, then bent to pick up the keys.

  “Okay,” he said, straightening. “Both or none it is. Allies—friends.” He gave her a grudging smile. “I won’t forget again.”

  “Good.”

  He took the envelope from her and led the way across the parking lot. “Three-sixty,” he said over his shoulder.

  She was already glancing behind them and to the sides, and didn’t reply. No cars slowed or sped up as they crossed the two lanes of Cherokee, and Vickery didn’t see anybody sitting in the visible parked cars, and when he pulled open the door of Boardner’s nobody at the bar showed any special alertness as they stepped into the dim interior and made their way down the row of booths to one at the far end. Scents of gin and leather floated on the cool air.

  Vickery laid the envelope on the table between them, and looked up at the waitress who had walked to the booth. He recognized her from their visit the day before.

  “Today I’ll have a Kahlua and milk, please,” Castine told her. “Caffeine,” she explained to Vickery.

  “Could I have the two Coorses together this time,” Vickery said. “It’s been that kind of day.”

 
When the waitress had smiled sympathetically and moved away, Vickery slid the contents of the envelope out on the table. He picked up a booklet that was on top and riffled through it. It was old, the staples separating from the tanned pages.

  “It’s a coloring book,” he said quietly after he had flipped half of the pages, “like Ragotskie told us. Caricatures, very ’60s—Dylan, Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce.”

  “He said Harlowe printed one last year, and distributed it,” said Castine, peering past Vickery’s elbow at the thing. “With some picture from this old one reprinted in it.”

  “They’re dumb pictures.” He flipped to the back page.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” She touched the page. Printed on it was an intricate pattern of tightly curved lines.

  “I don’t know,” said Vickery. “A maze?”

  “No, look, there’s a figure in the middle of it. It’s a bird, like a hawk, with a human head. And it’s got a little beard, like a goat.”

  Vickery felt a chill along his forearms. “It looks kind of like . . . ” he began.

  And Castine finished the thought: “An Egyptian hieroglyph.” She slapped the coloring book closed, sending bits of brown paper flying. “Ragotskie said don’t stare at it!”

  Vickery sat back. “Does a picture in a coloring book count as an artifact?”

  Castine slid a newer-looking pamphlet out of the sheaf of papers. “This must be the one Harlowe printed up.” She opened several pages at random; it did appear to be a coloring book. “It’s published by ChakraSys,” she said, “all pictures of smiling people doing exercises or sitting on the floor eating bananas. Ah—but check out the back page.”

  On the back page was the same convoluted pattern they had seen in the old coloring book, with the same human-headed hawk figure at the center of it. As soon as Vickery nodded in recognition, she closed the book.