Last Call: Expiration Date Part 26

As he closed his eyes and drifted toward sleep, he thought: Still, Doctor, you did try a couple of sips of beer.

BOOK THREE.

HIDE, HIDE, THE COW'S OUTSIDE!.

I don't claim that our personalities pa.s.s on to another existence or sphere. I don't claim anything because I don't know anything about the subject; for that matter, no human being knows. But I do claim that it is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, this apparatus will at least give them better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and raps and ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication.

-Thomas Alva Edison.

Scientific American, October 30, 1920.

CHAPTER 33.

"But it's no use now," thought poor Alice, "to pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!"

-Lewis Carroll.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

KOOTIE WOKE UP WHEN a black man nudged his foot with a bristly push broom. The boy straightened up stiffly in the orange plastic chair and blinked around at the silent chrome banks of clothes dryers, and he realized that he and the black man were the only people in the laundromat now. Whenever he had blinked out of his fitful naps during the long night, there had been at least a couple of women with sleepy children wearily clanking the change machine and loading bright-colored clothing into the was.h.i.+ng machines in the fluorescent white glare, but they had all gone home. The parking lot out beyond the window wall was gray with morning light now, and apparently today's customers had not yet marshaled their laundry.

"My mom will be back soon," Kootie said automatically, "she had to go back home for the bedspreads." He had said this many times during the night, when someone would shake him awake to ask him if he was okay, and they had always nodded and gone back to folding their clothes into their plastic baskets.

But it didn't work this morning. "I should charge you rent," said the black man gently. "Sun's up, boy."

Kootie slid down out of the seat and pulled his new sungla.s.ses out of his jacket pocket. "Sorry, mister."

"You wouldn't know anything about some chalk drawings somebody did on the outside of the building, would you?"

Kootie put on the sungla.s.ses before he looked up at the man. "No."

The man stared at him for a moment, then crinkled his eyes in what might have been a smile. "Oh well. At least it wasn't gang-marks from our Kompton Tray-Fifty-Seven Budlong Baby Dips.h.i.+ts or whoever they are today. And at least it was just chalk."

Kootie's head was stuffed and throbbing. "Are the chalk markings still there?"

"I hosed 'em off just now." Again he gave Kootie the wry near-smile. "Figured I'd let you know."

Kootie started to stretch, but he hitched and pulled his right arm back when the cut over his rib flared hotly in protest. "Okay, thanks."

He limped across the white linoleum, around the wheeled hanger-carts, to the gla.s.s doors, and as soon as he had pushed them open and stepped outside, he missed the stale detergent-scented air of the laundromat, for the dawn breeze was chilly, and harsh with the damp old-coins smell of sticky trash-can bottoms.

A half-pint bottle of 151-proof Bacardi rum had cost him sixteen dollars yesterday afternoon-six for the bottle, and a ten-dollar fee for the woman who had gone in and bought it for him. By her gangly coltish figure Kootie had judged her to be only a few years older than himself, but her tanned face, under the lipstick and eyeliner and flatteringly acne-like sores, had been as seamed and lined as a patch of sunbaked mud. Edison had made Kootie tear the ten-dollar bill jaggedly into two pieces before giving one half of it to the woman prior to the purchase; he had laughingly said that this made her his indentured servant, but neither Kootie nor the woman had understood him. He had wordlessly given her the other half of the bill after she had delivered the bottle.

Edison had already had Kootie buy a roll of adhesive tape and a box each of b.u.t.terfly bandages and "Sterile Non-Stick Pads," and then in a patch of late-afternoon sunlight behind a hedge on a side street off Vermont, Edison had pulled up Kootie's s.h.i.+rt to look at their wound, which had still been perceptibly leaking blood even though Kootie had been keeping his fist or his elbow pressed against it almost without a break since he had got away from the Southern California Edison truck half an hour earlier.

It was a V-shaped cut too big for him to be able to cover with his thumb, and Kootie had begun whimpering as soon as Edison started swabbing at it with a rum-soaked pad, so Edison had made Kootie swallow a mouthful of the rum. The taste was surprising-like what Kootie would have expected from film developer or antifreeze-but it did make his head seem to swell up and buzz, and it distracted him from the pain as Edison thoroughly cleaned the cut and then dried the edges, pulled them together, and fastened them shut with the I-shaped b.u.t.terfly bandages.

Then, with a pad taped over the closed and cleaned cut, Edison had had a sip of the rum himself. When Kootie had floundered back over the hedge and started down the sidewalk, he had seemed to be walking on the deck of a boat, and Edison steered him into a taquera to eat some enchiladas and salsa and drink several cups of c.o.ke. After that Kootie had been sober but sleepy, and they had found the laundromat, had furtively marked up the wall outside it, and finally had gone in to nap in one of the seats. The nap had continued, with interruptions, all night.

He s.h.i.+vered now in the morning breeze and shoved his hands into his pockets. He knew he must be sober, but the pavement still didn't seem firmly moored.

He felt his mouth open involuntarily, and he wearily braced himself for forcing it shut against some crazy outburst, but Edison just used it to say, grumpily, "Where are we now?"

"Walking on Western," said Kootie, quietly even though there were no other pedestrians on the sidewalk. "Looking for a bus to take us to a beach."

"Final discorporation is on my agenda today, is that it? Why did we have to go outside so early? It's cold. It was warm back in that automat."

Each spoken syllable was an effort, and Kootie wished Edison wouldn't use so many of them. "They washed the chalk off the wall," he said hoa.r.s.ely. Cars were rumbling past at his left, and his voice wasn't loud, but he knew Edison could hear him.

"Ah! Then you're a clever lad to have got away quickly." Kootie's mouth opened very wide then, so that the cold air got all the way in to his back teeth, and he was afraid Edison was going to bellow something that would be audible to any early-morning workers who might already be in these shadowed tax offices and closed movie-rental shops-but it was just a jaw-creaking yawn. "I shouldn't stay out here, in my excited state, like this. Compa.s.ses will be wagging. I'll go back to sleep. Holler for me if you-mff!"

Kootie had stumbled on a high curb and fallen to his knees.

"What's the matter?" said Edison too loudly. Kootie took the ending r sound and prolonged it into a groan that rose to a wail. "Don't talk so much," Kootie said despairingly. "I can't breathe when you do." He sniffed. "I bet we didn't get one full half hour of sleep last night without somebody waking us up to ask us something, or yelling at their kids or dropping baby bottles." He tried to struggle back to his feet, and wound up resting his forehead on the sidewalk. "I can still taste those enchiladas," he whispered to the faint trowel lines in the surface of the pavement. "And the rum."

"This won't do," came Edison's voice out of Kootie's raw throat. Kootie's arms and legs flexed and then acted in coordination, and he got his feet under himself and straightened all the way back up. Slanting morning sunlight lanced needles of reflected white glare off of car winds.h.i.+elds into his watering eyes.

"You're just not used to the catnap system," said Edison kindly. "I can go for weeks on a couple of interrupted hours a night. You go to sleep, now-I'll take the wheel for the next couple of miles."

"Can we do that?" asked Kootie. He left his mouth loose for Edison's reply, but had to close it when he felt himself starting to drool.

"Certainly. What you do is stand still for a moment here, and close your eyes-then in half a minute or so I'll open your eyes but you'll already have started to go to sleep, get it? You'll go ahead and relax, and you won't fall. I'll hold us up, and walk and talk. Okay?" Kootie nodded. "Close your eyes, now, and relax."

Kootie did, and he let himself fall away toward sleep, only peripherally aware of still being up in the air, and of the daylight when his eyes were eventually opened again. It was like falling asleep in a tree house over a busy street.

And his confused memories and worries wandered outside the yard of his control and began bickering among themselves, and a.s.sumed color and voices and became disjointed dreams.

His gray-haired father was at the front door of their Beverly Hills house, arguing with someone from the school district again. Sometimes Kootie's parents would keep him home from school when science cla.s.ses prompted him to ask difficult questions on topics like the actual properties of crystals and the literal meanings of words like energy and dimension.

"We're saving it for the boy," his father was saying angrily. "We're not selfish here. In my youth I had the clear opportunity to become a nearly perfect jagadguru, but I sacrificed that ambition, I unfitted myself by committing a theft, so that the boy could become the jagadguru perfectly, in psychic yin-and-yang twinhood with one who was the greatest of the unredeemed seers. The unredeemed one won't be able to accompany our boy to G.o.dhood, but he will be able to achieve redemption for himself by serving as the boy's guide through the astral regions. Right now the guide must wait-masked in the boy's persona ikon, as he will eventually occupy a place in the boy's persona. In order for the union to be seamless, it must occur after the boy has achieved p.u.b.erty."

Kootie had heard his father say much the same thing to his mother, on the nights Kootie had tiptoed back up the hall after his bedtime. It all had to do with the Dante statue, and the drunks and crazy people who wanted to talk to Don Tay.

His father waved ineffectually. "Clear off, or I'll have no choice but to summon the police."

But now Kootie could see the man standing grinning on the front doorstep, and it was the one-armed man with the tiny black unrecessed eyes.

Kootie flinched, and the dream s.h.i.+fted-he was lying in the back seat of a car, half asleep, rocking gently with the shock absorbers on the undulating highway and watching the door handle gleam in reflected oblique light when the occasional streetlamp swept past out in the darkness. He was relaxed, slumped in the tobacco-scented leather upholstery-this wasn't Raffle's Maverick, nor the old marooned Dodge Dart he had slept in on Wednesday night, nor the Fussels' minivan. He was too warm and comfortable to s.h.i.+ft around and look at the interior, but he didn't have to. He knew it was a Model T Ford. The driver was definitely his father, though sometimes that was Jiddu Parganas and sometimes it was Thomas Edison.

Kootie smiled sleepily. He didn't know where they were driving to, and he didn't need to know.

But suddenly there was a screech of brakes, and Kootie was thrown forward into the back of the front seat-he hit it with his open palms and the toes of his sneakers.

The dream impact jolted him out of sleep, and so he was awake when his palms and the toes of his sneakers. .h.i.t the cinder-block wall an instant later; using the momentum of the leap he had found himself making, he flung one leg over the top of the wall, and before he boosted himself up and dropped into the dirt lot on the other side, he glanced behind him.

The glance made him scramble the rest of the way over the wall and land running, and he was across the lot and over a chain-link fence before he had taken and exhaled two fast breaths, and then he was pelting away down a palm-shaded alley, looking for some narrow L-turn that would put still more angles and distance between himself and the Western Avenue sidewalk.

A pickup truck had been pulled in to the curb, and five men in sleeveless white unders.h.i.+rts had hopped out of the bed of it to corner him; but what had driven the fatigue out of his muscles was a glimpse of the bag-thing one of the men was carrying.

It was a coa.r.s.e burlap sack, flopping open at the top to show the clumps of hair it was stuffed with, and a battered Raiders baseball cap had been attached to the rim and was bobbing up and down as the man carrying it stepped up the curb; but the sack was rippling as if a wind were buffeting it, and harsh laughter was shouting out of the loose flaps. As Kootie had scrambled over the wall, the bag had called to him, "Tu sabes quien trae las llaves, Chavez!" and barked out another terrible laugh.

Kootie was beginning to limp now on his weak ankle, and his cut rib was aching hotly. He crossed a street of old houses and hurried down another alley, ceaselessly glancing over his shoulder and ready to duck behind one of the old parked cars if he glimpsed the b.u.mper of a pickup truck rounding the corner.

"What was that?" he asked finally in a grating whisper, and even just forming the question squeezed tears of fright out of his eyes.

Even Edison's voice was unsteady. "Local witch-boys," he panted. "They tracked us with a compa.s.s, I've got to a.s.sume. I'm going to go under, clathrate, so they can't track me. Holler if you need me-"

"But what was that?"

"Ahhh." Kootie's shoulders were raised and lowered. "They ... got a ghost, captured one, and had it animate the trash in that bag, apparently. It's got no legs, so it can't run away ... but ... well, you heard it? I was afraid you did. It can talk. Cheerful thing, hmm?" The bravura tone of Edison's last remark was hollow.

"It woke me up."

"Yes, I felt you wake up in the instant before we hit the wall. It's like hearing the tiny snap of a live switch opening, just before the collapsing electric field makes a big spark arc across the gap, isn't it?"

"Just like that."

Kootie was still walking quickly, and he could tell that it was himself placing one foot in front of the other now. "Where do I go now?" he asked, ashamed of the pleading note in his voice.

"G.o.d, boy-just walk straight away from here, fast. As soon as I'm under consciousness you should start looking for someplace to hide for a while-behind a hedge, or go upstairs in some office building, or hide in a boring section of the library."

"Okay," said Kootie, clenching his teeth and looking ahead to the next street. "Don't hide too deep, okay?"

"I'll be not even as far away as your nose."

CHAPTER 34.

" 'Bring it here! Let me sup!'

It is easy to set such a dish on the table.

'Take the dish-cover up!' Ah, that is so hard that I fear I'm unable!"

-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Gla.s.s SHERMAN OAKS SAT s.h.i.+VERING in the early-morning sunlight on a wall beside the parking lot of an A.M. P.M. minimart. His companions, two ragged middleaged men who were pa.s.sing back and forth a bottle of Night Train in a paper bag, were ghosts, old enough and solid enough to throw shadows and to contain fortified wine without obviously leaking. They were pointing at a skinny lady in shorts and high heels at the street corner, and laughing ("FM shoes, 'f.u.c.k me' shoes, hyuck-hyuck-hyuck"), but Oaks just clutched his elbows and s.h.i.+vered and stared down at the litter of paper cups and beer cans below his dangling feet.

He was starving. The four piece-a-s.h.i.+t ghosts he had inhaled yesterday were all the sustenance he had had for more than three days, and the Bony Express was a shrill chorus in his head and a seeping of blood from the corners of his fingernails.

He hadn't slept last night. He hadn't even been able to stop moving-walking along sidewalks, riding buses, climbing the ivied grades of freeway shoulders. During the course of the long night he had found his way to a couple of his secluded ghost traps, but though the creatures had been there, hovering bewilderedly around the palindromes and the jigsaw-puzzle pieces, he hadn't been able to sniff them all the way up into his head; they had gone in through his nostrils smoothly enough, but just b.u.mped around inside his lungs until he had to exhale, and then they were back out on the dirt again, stupidly demanding to know what had happened. He had even inhaled over one of the antismoke crowd's L.A. CIGAR-TOO TRAGICAL ashtrays in an all-night doughnut shop, and got nothing but ashes up his nose.

He was jammed up.

The "big ghost" that had been s.h.i.+ning over the magical landscape of Los Angeles for the past four days had been the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison. It had been Edison's face on the collapsed ectoplasm figure at the Music Center, the day before yesterday. And now Edison had (again!) fed Oaks a rotted ghost-and it had jammed him up, and he was starving.

Oaks looked up at the sky, and he remembered mornings when he had snorted his fill the night before, and had had more unopened vials ready to hand. I'd like it always to be six o'clock on a summer morning, he thought, and I'm in a sleeping bag on some inaccessible balcony or behind a remote hedge, and my feet are warm but my arms and head are out in the cool breeze and I'm sweating with a sort of disattached, unspecific worry, and I've got hours yet to just lie there and listen to the traffic and the parrots flying past overhead.

The police would be after him. He had run away from that confusion in Inglewood yesterday afternoon, but his shots had probably hit both of the cops in that patrol car, and his fingerprints were all over the inside of the SCE truck, and the van in the back of it. And the police probably still had his fingerprints on file; he now remembered that he had held several custodial jobs in hospitals, during the fifties and sixties, catching fresh death-ghosts and lots of the tasty, elusive birth-ghosts.

He'd have to get rid of the revolver-a "ballistics team" would be able to tell that it was the weapon that had fired on the police car. Oaks should have no trouble finding some street person who would take it in trade for some other (certainly less desirable) sort of gun.

But the police, unfortunately, weren't his main problem.

He twitched, and turned to the ghost sitting nearest him on his left. The man was breaking off fragments of mortar from between the cinder blocks of the wall, and eating them.

"You'll choke," Oaks rasped.

"Hyuck-hyuck. Choke on this," said the ghost, without any gesture.

"I'm choking," said Oaks. "If you choke on one of those rocks, a Heimlich maneuver could unblock it, right? How can I unblock a spoiled ghost from my mind-pipe? Do you know?"

The ghost wrinkled his spotty forehead in a frown, and then began counting off points on the fingers of one hand. "Okay, you got stones in your ears and a magnet up your nose, right? And toads have got a stone in their heads. The Venerable Bead. And plenty of people have got shrapnel and metal plates in them, and steel hips. Check it out. Learnest Hand Hemingway used to save the shrapnel that came out of his legs and put it in little bowls so that his friends could take the bits as souvenirs; and eat them, of course, to get a bit of Hemingway." He smiled. "Everything is a Learnest experience. The golden rule to be in-got at the College of Fortuitous Knox. Fort You-It-Us Knocks." (The unattained pun made the intended spelling clear.) "It's important to feel good about yourself. This morning I met somebody I really like-me."

"That's good," said Oaks hopelessly. "Tell him h.e.l.lo from me, if you ever run into him again."

There was apparently no help to be had from the ghosts themselves. Oaks was choked, and the only way he knew how to unjam himself was likely to kill him. This time. Instead of just costing him another limb.

He could remember all kinds of things now. He remembered that Thomas Alva Edison had choked him this way once before-or at least once before-in 1929. Small surprise that the flattened face on the Music Center parking-level stairs had looked familiar! No wonder the Edison logo on the side of the truck had upset him! He should have paid attention to his forebodings. Thomas Alva Edison had never been any good for him.

As the shock-loosened memories had come arrowing up to the surface of his mind, one right after another, during his endless odyssey last night, Oaks had learned that he had always been an ambitious fellow, setting his sights on the most powerful people around and then trying to catch them unguarded so that he could s.n.a.t.c.h out of their heads their potent ghosts.

He had pursued the famous escape artist Harry Houdini for at least sixteen years-fruitlessly. Houdini had evaded every trap, had been effectively masked, psychically inaccessible, at every face-to-face confrontation. Houdini had even given protection to his friends: there had been a writer of horror stories in Rhode Island to whom Houdini had given his own severed thumb in June of 1924; Houdini had had his plaster mask-hands made by then, and could a.s.sume them and make them flesh any time he liked, and so he didn't need the original-issue thumb anymore, and besides, Houdini, had probably known that he himself was only a couple of years from death at that point. In Los Angeles, Houdini had even picked up some kind of electric belt for this writer friend, an electromagnetic device that could supposedly cure all kinds of ailments, including Blight's disease and cancer-which pair of illnesses the writer died of in 1937, in fact, for he had been skeptical of the belt and disgusted by the thumb, and had got rid of them.

Houdini himself had been untouchable, a genuine escape artist ... even though Oaks had eventually managed to arrange his physical death on a Halloween. It had been useless, for even in the moment of his dying Houdini had eluded him. Trying to catch Houdini had always been like trying to cross-examine an echo, wound an image in a mirror, sniff out a rose in an unlighted gallery of photographs of flowers.

Houdini's parents must have known right from his birth that their son had a conspicuous soul, for they had taken quick, drastic steps to hamper access to it. Confusingly, they had given him the name Erik, which was the same name they'd given to their first son, who had died of a fall while still a baby; and within weeks of Houdini's birth they had moved from Budapest to London to G.o.dd.a.m.n Appleton, Wisconsin!-and given an inaccurate birth date for him.

Slippery name, vast distance from his birthplace, and a bogus birthday. Worthless coordinates.

And the boy had compounded the snarling of his lifeline by running away at the age of twelve to be an itinerant boot polisher for the U.S. Cavalry. When that proved to be an unreliable career, he had just drifted, riding freight trains around the Midwest-begging, doing manual labor on farms, and learning magic from circus sideshows. With no real name or address or nativity date, his soul had no ready handles, and such ghost fanciers as might have been intrigued by the weirdly powerful boy were no doubt left holding a metaphorical empty coat while the boy himself was safely asleep in a probably literal outward-bound boxcar.