Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  The twins scampered ahead down the central aisle between rows of wooden pews arranged in a herringbone pattern.

  “There’s a dozen or so cots set up downstairs,” said Harlowe, stepping up beside Loria and waving vaguely. “though there’s only two bathrooms down there—there’s another up here, in the sacristy, for us senior staff—and there’s a kitchen in a kind of meeting hall out back. And I had them set up a TV downstairs—DVDs in a box, get the girls set up down there, and then you’ve got to help me try to deal with Pratt.”

  “What, funeral arrangements? Couldn’t one of the others . . . ” The twins were in one of the pews now, kneeling, and Loria wondered where they could have picked that up.

  “No,” said Harlowe, “I’ve got to get his ghost into that copy of The Secret Garden that has Vickery’s daughter in it! Together in there, contrarily paired, they should function as . . . ghost flypaper, able to catch and absorb any ghosts that are attracted to our vibrant, emerging egregore.”

  Loria had been listening with decreasingly concealed impatience, and now she burst out, “Oh for God’s sake, Simon! There’s no ghost in that book, and Pratt’s dead and gone! You might as well try to—catch leprechauns with a box of Lucky Charms cereal!”

  Harlowe leaned toward her until his face was just inches from hers, and she could feel the mental buzz as their auras overlapped. “Pratt’s ghost,” he hissed, “broke the window of my SUV a couple of hours ago, a mile north of here! And it’s not a ghost in the book, it’s a distinct person who paradoxically never existed, never got born! The juxtaposition, the incongruous overlap, the impossibility of the pairing must certainly distract any ghosts that . . . come fluttering around our flame.”

  Loria stepped back. “Get Pratt’s ghost into the book,” she said, nodding. “So I should scout up a funnel and a mallet, maybe?”

  “I’ve got his toothbrush, it was back at the Sepulveda office. We cam summon him with that. His spit, his DNA will be all over it. I think one of us should lick it to catch his attention—”

  “Yuck! That’s you, that does that.”

  “Fine! And the other, you, hold open the book when I toss his ghost onto it, and you slap the book shut.”

  Loria stared at him. “You really think this is possible? Actually? Ghosts?”

  “And never-born persons. Yes. It’s implicit in the math, just as antimatter was implicit in Dirac’s relativistic wave equation. Ours is a weirder sort of math, admittedly, but—eppur si muove. Listen, we may have to talk Pratt into cooperating. You always got along with him.”

  Loria knew that the Italian phrase meant something like, Nevertheless, it moves. She believed Galileo had said it about the solar system.

  “Who?” she said. “Oh, Pratt. He was a puppy dog. And—like all of us—he wanted to be in the egregore. Doesn’t this book business kind of exclude him from that?”

  “He’s excluded already, Agnes, because he died! He’s a ghost! Think! I’ve got the book here now, in the sacristy—get the girls downstairs.”

  “This is—” Loria realized that she didn’t want to finish the sentence. She turned away and began striding up the aisle toward where the twins knelt as if in prayer.

  Ten minutes later she was standing beside Harlowe at a counter beside a stainless steel sink, looking down at a blue plastic toothbrush and an open trade paperback book. The sacristy was narrow, with a high, cobwebbed ceiling and a print of the Last Supper hung on the far wall; the only window was above the sink, and fogged with dirt. After clicking a light switch up and down for several seconds, Harlowe had struck a match to a couple of candles, and the smell of burning wicks dispelled the old reek of incense.

  “Oh,” he said, his hand now extended halfway to the toothbrush, “have you ever—excuse me—been intimate with somebody who died on, or very close to, a freeway?”

  “What . . . the . . . hell?”

  “If you haven’t, then you probably won’t be able to see Pratt’s ghost. In that case, you’ll have to—”

  “Have you? I always got the idea you were seriously celibate. Now that we’re getting personal.”

  Harlowe’s eyes dulled and his face sagged, and the wrinkles around his mouth were more evident—the expression was vacuity, as if he had lost consciousness, but his voice was level: “No, but I, I killed a man once. A burglar, in my trailer in Salinas, in ’83. It was only a hundred feet from the 101 freeway.”

  “Were you intimate with him before or after you killed him?”

  Harlowe’s face resumed animation, and he pressed his lips together in evident annoyance. “Sex,” he said, picking up the toothbrush, “is not the only intimacy. Killing somebody unites the two of you even more indissolubly. When I nod to you, that will mean Pratt’s ghost is here—tell him—”

  “So this is going to be an invisible ghost.” Loria had tried to sound sarcastic, but her voice had quavered; What would become of her if Harlowe were simply insane? Had she wasted nearly two years on a heartbreakingly attractive fantasy?—and driven away a man who loved her, and whom she might have loved?

  Harlowe seemed to sense her misgivings. “You’ve experienced a bit of what the twins can do,” he said quietly. “You’ve seen some edges of humanity begin to fall partway into our egregore already, the events you call black-hole phenomena. But the idea of a ghost is inconceivable?”

  “Oh, shit, whatever.” More than anything else, she felt all at once very depressed. “Let’s do your trick.”

  Harlowe lifted the toothbrush. “When I nod to you, tell him why he should get into the book. Keep your eyes on the floor then, and try to break up your sentences. Apparently it’s not a good idea to speak to ghosts in recognizably complete sentences.”

  “Why he should? What reasons do I give him?”

  Harlowe waved the toothbrush impatiently. “Improvise. Here goes.” And he licked the toothbrush and said, loudly, “Pratt! Come over here!”

  Loria kept her eyes on Harlowe, waiting for his nod. Why don’t you just jump into that book there? she thought. There’s a nice nonexistent girl in it, waiting for you. She hoped nobody would come in while this crazy exercise was going on.

  “Pratt!” called Harlowe again, and again he licked the toothbrush. Loria managed not to gag. “Pratt!” Harlowe repeated.

  And then Loria jumped back, convinced for a moment that two birds had got into the sacristy and were swooping around her head; but when she focused on one of the flapping things, she numbly comprehended that it was bodiless human hand. The other one, also now visibly a hand, bounced off a cabinet, dropped several feet and hovered a yard above the linoleum floor.

  Loria’s shoulders thumped against the wall beside the nave door, for she had reflexively backed away fast from the spectacle; her face was stiff and the breath was stopped in her throat. Now, with a sound like cloth tearing, the churning gray silhouette of a man flipped into view between her and Harlowe, and when the darting hands fluttered to the smoky wrist stumps and clung there, the silhouette assumed color and three dimensions.

  The figure was recognizably young David Pratt, though it rippled like a projection on an unmoored bedsheet. It appeared to be in pain—its chest was heaving as if it were panting, though it made no sounds, and at each spasmodic constriction a red vapor jetted from its gaping mouth.

  “Look at the floor!” snapped Harlowe. “And talk to it!”

  “Send it away!” said Loria hoarsely. “This isn’t—”

  “Tell it to get into the goddamn book! And look at the floor!”

  Loria stared down at her shoes. “David,” she said, emptying her lungs. She inhaled, and managed to croak, “get—in that book, you can—relax, forget everything. Good God.”

  “There’s,” whispered the thing that stood between her and Harlowe, “a nobody in the book.”

  “Wouldn’t you,” she faltered, “like to be with—a nobody? Instead of—somebodies?”

  Still staring at the floor, in her peripheral vision she saw the Pratt gho
st expand to enormous size and then shrink to a buzzing dot; and the dot wavered out of her sight toward the counter.

  She heard Harlowe slam the book shut. A momentary wave of hot air swept past her.

  “Got it myself,” he said.

  She looked up and saw the book, closed now, on the counter. It was distinctly shivering.

  Harlowe lifted it in both hands. “You saw it,” he said. “I doubt you’ve ever killed anyone, so some lover of yours must have died on or near a freeway in the last year or so. I hope it wasn’t Elisha. He’s still our Judas goat.”

  She had had only had two others. Dazedly she hoped it was Brad, who had moved away and stopped answering her texts when she had believed she was pregnant during her senior year at UCLA.

  She looked at the book in Harlowe’s hands, and realized that she was smiling. Pratt’s ghost had been real after all, and Harlowe had trapped it in that battered paperback book, just as he had said he would. He wasn’t insane, or if he was, it was a splendid and effective insanity. The egregore was not a delusion, and she would finally be able to dissolve her ignoble identity into the transcendent entity that would be God, or as good an approximation of the fabled Deity as there would ever be.

  She looked at Harlowe, noting the habitual black turtleneck sweater, and the blatantly artificial dark-red color of the hair that curled around below his ears, and the high shine on his ridiculous red cowboy boots.

  “Are you resolutely celibate?” she breathed, not sure what answer she hoped for.

  Harlowe looked away from her, then took a step toward the door to the nave, clutching the paperback book. “People like us have better things to do than to form adhesions,” he said, and then he was striding away toward the door.

  The familiar six notes from Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration sounded from her pocket, and she called, “Wait” to Harlowe as she pulled out her phone. She glanced at the screen and said, “It’s Elisha.”

  Harlowe had stopped, and now he hurried back, gripping the book in both hands. “Find out where he is,” he said.

  Loria swiped the screen. “Elisha!” she said, “Where are you?”

  “The St. James Infirmary,” came Ragotskie’s voice from the phone; and he went on to sing some old-sounding bluesy lyrics about a guy visiting his dead girlfriend in a hospital, and how she’d never find another man like him.

  “Well no, not if she’s dead, honey,” said Loria. She covered the microphone slot with her thumb and whispered to Harlowe, “I can hear people chatting, and surf in the background.” Lifting her thumb, she said, “I didn’t know they meant to kill you, Elisha! I’m so sorry! Where are you? I need to see you.”

  She heard the distinctive clink of a bottle on a glass, and then Ragotskie said, “I hope you mean that, Agnes, for your own sake. I don’t think your egregore is going to happen, and if not, it’d be nice if you walked away from the failure with a functioning conscience.”

  Now she heard a dog barking, not far from Ragotskie’s phone.

  Again she covered the microphone slot, and whispered, “I’m sure he’s at the On the Waterfront Café, in Venice. We used to go there.” She uncovered the slot.

  Harlowe nodded and ran to the nave door, the heels of his cowboy boots knocking on the linoleum floor.

  As he yanked it open and hurried out into the nave, Loria said into the phone, “Why do you think it’s not going to happen, Elisha?”

  “Well if I told you,” he said, and his voice was constricted with bitterness and satisfaction, “you might be able to save it, and lose your—your poisonously lovely self. That was Harlowe’s boots I heard, wasn’t it? This is a burner phone, but I’m going to hang up now just in case your murdering Messiah can track it. Goodbye, Agnes. I really think some of these days . . . well, you never heard of Sophie Tucker, but,” and then he sang, “you’re gonna miss me.”

  The connection ended with a click, and Loria dropped the phone back into her pocket. That’s okay, sweetie, she thought as she walked toward the nave door herself, just take your time over that beer.

  Probably it was Brad who had died on a freeway. And good enough for him.

  CHAPTER TEN:

  What’s the Hex?

  Vickery took the 101 freeway to the 110 south, and the battering of wind in the open back windows discouraged conversation. Again they drove past the spot from which they had both exited the normal world last year—but it was on the northbound shoulder, and there was no other world to fall into now, and Castine didn’t even look across the median. Vickery got off the freeway at Sixth Street, and drove slowly along the shadowed, tree-bordered floor of the canyon between the skyscrapers, the tops of which gleamed orange in the westering sunlight. The streets here were all one-way, so at Olive Street he turned left, then turned left again on Fifth and again on Flower, and then he was almost superstitiously wary to find an empty parking space right across the street from the library.

  Only the library’s tower was visible above a couple of jacaranda trees, but he remembered the long pools and the cypresses in front of the modernist Art Deco façade. He had often come here, in the days when he had been a Los Angeles police officer, just to stand under the murals in the high-ceilinged rotunda, and take the escalators up through the vast airy volume of the atrium to wander among the comforting shelves of literature on the third floor.

  It seemed like someone else’s life.

  He and Castine crossed the street and stepped up the curb and between the trees, and then they were walking in the shadows of the cypresses, up the stepped levels beside the long blue-tiled ornamental pools. Vickery noticed new sculptures in the pools as he passed them—an iron lizard in one, and an iron lizard skeleton in the next. Ahead were the green copper doors below the remembered frieze of Greek horsemen.

  Castine hopped up the last steps and pulled open one of the doors, then led the way down a brightly-lit hall to the Directory kiosk. Computer monitors and keyboards were arranged on a circular waist-high shelf around it, and she quickly tapped a keyboard, then entered her card and PIN numbers into spaces on the computer’s screen.

  “What time is it?” she asked, without looking away from the screen.

  Vickery tilted his wrist. “Quarter of five.”

  “I’ll make a reservation for five o’clock. Never mind, a computer’s free right now. And—we’ve got an hour. It’s at International Languages, one floor down.” She lifted a couple of pencils and a sheaf of blank cards from slots on the shelf.

  They took an escalator down one side of the atrium and stepped off at the next floor. On their right was a bank of windows and an open glass door and a sign that said New Americans Center, altogether looking like a little shop in a mall. Castine walked through the doorway, and Vickery followed her across the carpet to a polished wood booth; inside it were a low table with a computer monitor and keyboard and mouse, a shelf to the right, and a wooden chair. Castine sat down and Vickery stood beside her, leaning forward.

  She clicked past the opening screen and said, “What?”

  “Try Googling ChakraSys,” said Vickery.

  She found chakrasys.com on Google and clicked on it, and the page that appeared had CHAKRASYS in flowing blue letters along the top, above a stylized silhouette of a woman sitting in the yoga position with seven colored stars arranged vertically on her body from head to crotch. Below that was the address of the emptied building on Sepulveda, along with a phone number, and off in a sidebar was a photo of a florid man with wavy, dark red hair standing in front of a wall of variously colored glass jars on shelves. He wore a black turtleneck sweater and cut-off jeans, and one hand was raised in a gesture of something like benediction. The caption was CEO Simon Harlowe.

  “Well, there’s our guy,” said Castine quietly.

  The text below was apparently innocuous information about meditation and pranayama breathing and clearing energy blocks to align one’s physical body with one’s “subtle body.” Diet and exercise were evidently important. There w
ere no links or further pages.

  “Note the phone number, at least,” Vickery said, “and then let’s get back to Google.” He scratched his beard. “My passwords have all been changed since I was a cop, so I don’t have access to sites like CLETS—That’s the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System—but let’s try Pipl.”

  He spelled it for her, and after a few clicks she was at the Pipl website, and she entered Simon Harlowe. On the next screen she specified California, and only one name came up: Simon Harlowe, 61 years old, from San Francisco and Los Angeles. Harlowe’s name was in blue, so she clicked on it.

  The page that came up had the picture of Harlowe from the ChakraSys site at the top. Under “Career” was just the word “entrepreneur,” and his listed education was Stanford University from 1973 to 1975.

  “Pretty good,” said Castine, “to get in when he was sixteen. But I doubt he got a degree in two years.”

  The phone number the site provided was the same as the one on the ChakraSys site, but under “Places,” in addition to the familiar address on Sepulveda, was an address on Pico. Castine was already writing it down.

  “Let’s check out Mr. Chronic,” she said. She typed in chronic los angeles hippie 1968, but though 170,000 sites were found, the ones on the first few Google pages either didn’t include the word chronic or had to do with homelessness and bronchitis. Substituting guitarist for hippie got different sites, but none in which Chronic was a name.

  “Oh well,” said Castine. “What was the title of that movie that supposedly had the old house in it?”

  “What’s the Hex?”

  Castine went to the International Movie Data Base site and entered the title.

  “Here we are, What’s the Hex?, 1966—Not Rated, 110 minutes, comedy drama.”

  Under the broad IMDb banner was a summary of the movie: A beautiful witch raises the ghosts of dead surfers to compete in a surfing competition, with See full summary >>

  Castine clicked on the link, but the remainder of the summary was just: unfortunate results.