Dead Lines

by Greg Bear

  He listened to the message again. Double whammy: Lydia had used a phone, and Phil had a house in Marin.

  “Who’d of thunk it?” Peter asked. His voice sounded childish, even petulant, as if he were resentful that Phil had kept secrets. Phil had kept secrets from his best friend and then ditched him.

  He went to pack his bag.

  CHAPTER 5

  JOSEPH STRETCHED OUT on a lounge chair with a florid towel spread over his legs. He listened to Peter’s report with a gray, still face. Not even the sun shining through the sunhouse glass over the pool could improve his pallor. He looked impassive, like an old king who has seen and done it all.

  When Peter finished, Joseph started to tap his thumb on his draped knee. Peter did not tell the rest of the story. He still had not made any sense of that part of the night’s events.

  “Sandaji took my money?” Joseph asked.

  “Her assistant did,” Peter said.

  “All God’s children need money,” Joseph said with yielding disappointment. Peter had never heard such a tone of defeat coming from the man.

  “Actually, I forgot to hand it over and had to go back,” Peter said. “I thought about just keeping it.” Sometimes Joseph was cheered by confessions of human greed and weakness.

  “I would have,” Joseph said. “What did she mean by that answer?”

  Peter shrugged. “I’m not much on this soul business, you know that.”

  “I didn’t used to be. I’m giving it some real thought.”

  “We’re getting old,” Peter sympathized.

  “Hell, you can still jog around the house and fuck when you want. For me, just going to the bathroom is a thrill.”

  “Bull,” Peter said, shading his eyes.

  “Yeah,” Joseph said. “Old man bullshit. I can still get it up, but I don’t know that I want to anymore.”

  They sat for a minute.

  “I’ve led a wicked life, Peter,” Joseph said. “I’ve hurt people. Messed around and messed up every which way. Despite it all, here I am with the sun and the sea and the hills and the cool night breezes, living on twenty acres of paradise. Makes you think. What’s the downside? Where’s the comeuppance?”

  Peter left that one alone. He was not in the mood for discussing ultimates.

  “Where do we all go?” Joseph asked in a husky whisper.

  “I’m going to Marin,” Peter said. “To a wake. That’s sober enough, isn’t it?”

  “Was your friend a good man?”

  Peter shrugged. “A better man than me, Gunga Din.”

  Joseph cracked a dry smile. “Was he your water bearer?”

  “He saved my life when I was at the end of my tether. And he braved many an insult for a chance to peer at the ladies.”

  “Sounds like he had at least one good friend,” Joseph said, softening. Right before his eyes, Peter thought, the sun was melting this chilly man with the gray face. The sun and the thought of a wake.

  “You’d love what I saw last night,” Joseph said, apropos of nothing. He stared at the horizon, the hazy blue sea beyond the grass and hills. “Do you believe in spooks, Peter?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “I hope I never see them again.”

  Peter shivered involuntarily. He did not like this.

  Another silence.

  Joseph grimaced as if experiencing a stomach pain and waved his hand. “I’ll tell Michelle to give you a five-hundred-dollar bonus. Come say howdy when you’re back.”

  Peter prepared to leave. Joseph spoke out from across the pool. “Michelle tells me those damn plastic thingies actually work. She’s passing them around to her friends. Maybe I booted that whelp son of a bitch too early.”

  Joseph waved his hand again. All was square.

  * * *

  MICHELLE WAS UNUSUALLY quiet as she handed Peter five hundred dollars in cash in the foyer. It was eleven o’clock. The whole damned house felt sad, Peter thought.

  “When are you going to use a checking account?” she bugged him, a favorite topic. Peter had cut up all his credit cards and never carried a checkbook. He had a small savings account and that was it. He was now strictly cash-and-carry, paying his bills in person when he could, and having Helen write his tax and other checks when he visited to make child-care payments.

  “When I deserve to be a yuppie again,” he answered.

  “You can be such a pill,” Michelle said.

  As he left, she gave him a quick peck on the cheek and a friendly pat on the buns and wished him a good trip to Marin. “Don’t let it get you down,” she warned.

  Peter had already put his bags in the Porsche. He descended the winding road to Pacific Coast Highway and turned left into light traffic. He had had his share and more of grief, of unbearable loss and hopeful speculation. After his lowest moment, when manic anguish and drink had almost killed him, he had come down firmly on the side of teetotaling skepticism. Put on armor, wrapped himself in blankets.

  Now, for reasons he could not fathom, people were trying to poke him through the blankets. First Sandaji, and now Joseph.

  “Blow it off,” he suggested. Then he glanced in the rear-view mirror, looking into eyes made cynical by the rush of warm air. He puffed his upper lip into a feline pout and said “Spooks” several times, mimicking Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion in the forest of Oz.

  Fifty miles north of the Grapevine, driving north on 5, lulled by the road, he felt an oddly comforting, bluntly selective silence fill the Porsche. He could still hear the slipstream, the whine of the engine, the rumble of tires on the grooved freeway. Still, the silence was there. Sometimes that happened. He would be in a quiet room and the ambient noise would flicker, replaced by a distant, high-pitched hum that faded slowly into a new silence. He remembered listening to the whine of the air as a boy, back when his ears had been far more sensitive.

  He instinctively patted his pocket and felt the green Trans.

  His thoughts wandered as the traffic grew sparse and the freeway straight and monotonous. Someday, he mused, before all passion was spent, in this world of high-tech communications, his own final true love would call him and her voice would rise above the ambient noise of all the other women. That was Peter’s one supernatural quest now: the perfect woman, a beauty who watched him with cool amusement from behind his thoughts and memories, elusive and brazenly sexy.

  Peter had met only one woman that came close to that impossible ideal, a model and sometime actress named Sascha Lauten. Buxom, smart, cheerfully supportive, Sascha had been sufficiently vulnerable and sad about her life to make his heart puddle. Phil had warned him about Sascha. “She sees right through you,” he had said. “Your charms do not soothe her magnificent breasts.” Sascha had ultimately turned down his proposal and married a skinny-assed salesman with bad skin. They now lived quietly in Compton.

  He stuck his hand through the half-open window to feel the speed. Over the wind he sang, “I hate this crap, burn up the road, I hate this shit, burn up the ROAD.”

  CHAPTER 6

  PETER CROSSED THE Golden Gate Bridge at midnight and climbed the long hill into Marin before turning inland. Somehow, he missed a turn. Sitting at a gas station, he used the Trans to call Lydia. When she answered, her voice was like a little girl’s. She gave Peter the final directions to Phil’s house in Tiburon. “The place is filled with boxes,” Lydia said. “God, was he a pack rat.”

  Peter was tired. He thanked Lydia and closed the Trans. He had long wondered where Phil had stuck all the books and old magazines and movies that he had bought over the decades. Apparently, for some years Phil had been hauling his worldly goods north in the Grand Taiga, following through on a long-planned final escape from Los Angeles. And he had not told Peter about any of it.

  The last few miles he followed a winding, dark road beneath a black sky dusted with ten thousand diamonds. Shadowy grassland and expensive houses flanked the road. Beyond lay more hunched hills. When he found the last turn, onto a cul-de-sac ca
lled Hidden Dreams Drive, he looked south and saw San Francisco lit up like a happy carnival on the far shore of the Bay.

  The house cut three long, inky rectangles out of the starry sky between silhouettes of knobby, pruned-back trees. Peter drove up beside a new-style VW Beetle. As he set the parking brake, he saw Lydia sitting on a front porch swing, short, bobbed hair like a dark comma over her pale face. The orange bead of a cigarette dangled from her hand. She did not wave.

  Jesus, Peter thought. The lot alone must be worth a million dollars. He stood on the gravel at the bottom of two wooden steps. “Nice night,” he said.

  “I’m not staying,” Lydia announced. She got up from the porch swing and stubbed the cigarette into a tuna can. Then she tossed the butt into the darkness. Peter jerked, thinking she might start a fire or something. But that was Lydia.

  “Should I go in?” Peter said.

  “Up to you. He’d probably want you to,” Lydia said dryly, “just to sort through his stuff. Last hands pawing what he wanted most on this Earth. He sure didn’t love his ladies worth a damn.”

  Peter did not rise to the bait. Lydia stretched. At forty-eight, she still had a pruny grace. Low body-fat since youth—and wrinkles from smoking—had diminished her other native charms, but the grace remained.

  Peter hauled his one suitcase onto the porch. She handed over three keys on a piece of dirty twine. The twine was tied to a small piece of finger-oiled driftwood. The driftwood dangled below his hand, swinging one way, then another.

  “The medical examiner found my address in Phil’s little black book,” Lydia said. “Some cops came to visit me. They said he had been dead for a couple of days.” She opened the screen door for him. “Did you know he had this place?”

  Peter shook his head and entered the dark hallway. He set down his suitcase.

  “He sure as hell didn’t tell me,” Lydia went on. “It didn’t turn up on the divorce settlement. What do you think it’s worth?”

  “I have no idea,” Peter said.

  “Ancient history,” Lydia said. “Anyway, I got him into a crematorium in Oakland. I think maybe the mailman found him. He had been dead for a few days.”

  “You said that,” Peter said, grimacing.

  “The mortuary will bring him back tomorrow. Hand delivery. We’ll hold the wake in the backyard. I’ve invited some folks who knew Phil. And some of my friends. For backup.”

  “When did you get up here?” Peter asked.

  “This morning. I left everything the way I found it. Peter, I hope you understood him. I hope somebody understood Phil. I sure didn’t.”

  Peter did not know what to say to that.

  “You know, despite everything, he was the sweetest guy I ever met,” Lydia said. She poked Peter in the chest. “And that includes you. See you tomorrow around one. If they deliver Phil early, just put him on the mantel over the fireplace. And, oh . . .” She held out her hand. “I have no idea where he kept his money. I paid for everything. Donations cheerfully accepted.”

  Peter removed his wallet. He pulled out the five hundred dollars Michelle had given him in Malibu. He was about to peel off several of the bills when Lydia dipped her hand with serpentine grace and snatched the whole wad.

  She counted it quickly. “That doesn’t cover even half the cost,” she said. She patted his bearded cheek. “But thanks.” She walked across the gravel to the VW, her bony, denimed hips cycling a sideways figure 8.

  The car vanished into the dark beneath the stars.

  That left Peter with ten dollars, not enough to pay for the gas to get home.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE HOUSE WAS quiet and still. Outside, not a breath of air moved. A hallway beyond the alcove led past the living room, a bathroom, and the kitchen, to three rooms at the back.

  He switched on the lights in the alcove and the hall and stepped around two neatly taped boxes Magic-Markered with names and dates: UNKNOWN WORLDS 1940–43, STARTLING MYSTERY 1950–56. Handmade pine shelves filled with paperback mysteries and science fiction covered the wall behind the door, arched over the door, around the corner, and into the living room, where more shelves framed the wide front window. Beneath the window, records and old laser discs occupied a single shelf. He could make out still more shelves marching back into the shadows of a dining room, and stacked boxes where a table might have been.

  In the living room, a single threadbare couch faced a scarred coffee table and the wide window. The coffee table, seen from above, had the outline of a plumped square, like the tube of an old black-and-white television set. In the fifties, those conjoined curves had been the shape of the future. Peter thought about Indian-chief test patterns, the Monsanto House of the Future at Disneyland, and how such curvilinear dreams had become part of the deep and forgotten past.

  Their past.

  Phil liked old black-and-white movies best. His taste in music was even more conservative than Peter’s: Bach and Haydn and Mozart, no rock, just big bands and fifties jazz up to early Coltrane. No Monk, even.

  For some reason, it was taking time to get used to the idea that he had the house to himself. He kept thinking Phil would show up and grin and apologize, and then show him around, pulling books from shelves, removing their plastic bags to fondle his many little treasures.

  Materialism, with a difference. Give me ideas, stories, music. Forget booze and diamonds, forget women. Pages filled with printed words and grooves in vinyl are a guy’s best friend. So Phil had once told him.

  Peter found the kitchen. He filled a plastic glass with water from the tap. The sideboard was neatly piled with clean dishes. No cats or dogs, that was a blessing. Phil had never been enthusiastic about pets. Most of the cupboards in the kitchen were stuffed with old pulp magazines, G-8 and His Battle Aces, The Shadow, thick compound issues of Amazing Stories. One small corner shelf was reserved for cereal boxes and three more plastic glasses. The refrigerator held a six-pack of cheap beer, vanilla pudding cups, yogurt, clam chowder in plastic pouches. White foods.

  Phil loved mashed potatoes.

  Peter searched for coffee or tea. He needed something warm. Finally, he found a jar of instant coffee and a mug, right next to each other on the windowsill over the sink. He put on a saucepan of water and set it to boil. Then he pulled up an old-fashioned step stool and sat with a whuff, wiping the long drive from his eyes with a damp paper towel. He did not want to sleep in the house, but there wasn’t enough money left for a motel. The couch did not look inviting. Peter could not just sleep anywhere these days. His muscles knotted if he lay down wrong. Finally, cup in hand, he turned on all the overhead lights in the kitchen and hall and the back bedrooms, inspecting each one until he came to Phil’s. More shelves, mostly new and empty, as if waiting to be filled. It was not a mess; it was actually pretty neat. Spartan. Someone had made up the queen-sized bed.

  Phil never made his bed.

  Peter gritted his teeth. Lydia did not say where they had found Phil. The room did not smell. Still, he decided against sleeping in here. He took blankets from the hall closet and reluctantly settled on the couch. The window looked slantwise across the Bay at San Francisco, framed by two willow trees farther down the road. It was a beautiful view.

  “Jesus Christ, Phil,” Peter said. “If you come back, I’ll punch you. I swear to God I’ll punch you right in the face. You should have told me you were sick.”

  He was so tired. Against all his intellectual rigors, all his best intentions, he was still hoping to find Phil somewhere in the house. Hoping to grab one last minute together. “Where are you, buddy?”

  He finished the cold coffee. Caffeine had little effect on him, but he doubted he would be getting much sleep tonight. “Come on, Phil,” he cajoled, his voice like a small bird in the big living room. “One more time. Show up and give me a heart attack. Don’t ditch me.”

  Peter leaned back and pulled up a small wool blanket. He kept rolling around on the old cushions, pushing his legs out as his knees felt antsy. S
leep came, but it was uneven. Finally, awake again and bladder full, he got up, stumbled around the boxes, and walked down the long hall. Never afraid of the dark. Never have been. Empty dark. He touched his way along the wall to the bathroom door and turned right.

  A small plug-in night light illuminated a claw-foot tub, a round-mouthed porcelain toilet, and a stand-alone corner sink that must have dated from the teens or twenties. He lifted the toilet lid, unzipped his pants, and peed. Sighed at the relief from the sharp incentive nag. Not as bad as some his age, but still. Jiggled the stream around with childish intent, roiling the water. The little things we do when facing the big things, the imponderables. Peter softly sang a Doors song, “This is . . . the end . . . beautiful friend.”

  His stream finally faltered and he shook loose a few drops, harder to get the last dribble out, a small indignity, meaningless in the face of that awesome and final one.

  “My only friend . . . the end.”

  Something passed the open door, black against a lesser dark. Peter’s last squirt splashed on the floor. Half asleep, he stared in dismay at the puddle, zipped quickly, then bent to dab it up with a folded piece of toilet paper.

  What?

  Glancing left, he lowered the lid. His fingers slipped and the lid fell with a loud clatter on the ceramic bowl.

  Crap. Tell the world.

  He poked his head through the doorway and looked up and down the hall. His eyes were playing tricks. He wished Lydia, somebody, anybody, would pop out and go, “Boo!” just to show him how ridiculous he looked and sounded. How much he was betraying his vows to be skeptical.

  He might be doing it again, deceiving himself, hoping beyond hope, beyond the material world, and if it kept on this way, sliding into this painful, hopeful retreat from the rational, he knew where it could all lead: straight into another case of Wild Turkey.

  Trying to find the one who did it. Asking for Daniella. One last conversation with my daughter, oh my God.

  Something moved again in the hall, making not so much a distinct sound as a change in the volume of air. Now Peter was sure. Someone had come into the house while he was sleeping—not Phil, of course; a burglar. He reached into his pants pocket, feeling for the knife he sometimes kept there, and did not find it. It must have slipped out in the car or on the couch.