Dead Lines

by Greg Bear

  Peter reread the message, tears in his eyes.

  Both of us just disappointed kids.

  Finally, he folded the paper and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He then lifted the glass from the game board, toasted the empty air, and tossed it off neat. Even after sitting for days, the Scotch tasted great—smoke and fire and peat, a touch of vanilla oak—and immediately produced a far too pleasant effect. The second glass looked tempting. It was not his to drink, however. Something truly for the ghosts. He left it in the cupboard and closed the door, then rummaged in the kitchen and found a small box.

  One by one he placed the silver and bronze Enzenbacher pieces in the box, wrapping them in tissue paper from the bathroom.

  He had always liked that chess set.

  PETER PUT THE box into his suitcase and carried it out to the car. He pulled the Trans from the pocket of his jacket, which he had left slumped in the Porsche’s passenger seat.

  The unit lay pretty and green in his palm.

  The night air was chilly. He slipped on the jacket and hefted the Trans, thoughtful. Everything had sounded properly quiet in the Grand Taiga, but now, once again, below the quiet lay a deeper silence. Another illusion? Maybe he could ask Weinstein about that tomorrow.

  Peter returned to close and lock up the house. Something flickered in the corner of his eye. He looked left into the darkened living room. Pools of light played across the walls, danced in the mirror above the fireplace, reflections, it seemed, shining through the front window. But it hadn’t rained in days and the ground outside was dry. No puddles. Besides, the moon was too high to be playing tricks.

  The lights gleamed in the mirror, glinted off the urn.

  Phil’s ashes. The last bits.

  Peter stepped forward and picked up the urn, resolute. He would scatter the ashes somewhere nice. Absent a real will, he knew that was what Phil would have wanted, to sow him into the waves at Big Sur.

  Put his carbon back into the Earth’s recycling bin.

  Let me go choke a fish.

  He could almost hear Phil saying that; it sounded right. Well, good, then, he had a little bit of Phil’s voice inside him still. Urn under one arm, Peter stood for a moment by the door watching the reflections. His face went quizzical. It took him twenty seconds to see that the lights were near the walls, not on them, and floated just below the ceiling in the middle of the room.

  They weren’t reflections at all. They moved with far too much freedom. They were will-o’-the-wisps, making almost inaudible shoosh-woosh sounds, like large moths.

  Watching them was like slugging back a jolt of coffee; he felt connected, energized, curious. But the lights faded. The room turned dark and empty. Now he just felt lonely. The energy of a moment ago was replaced by something gray and unpleasant, like coming down off a high. He thought about going back and finishing Phil’s drink. Or looking for the bottle. Phil wouldn’t mind. A few minutes of solace . . .

  Peter closed and locked the door behind him, then replaced the house keys on a nail up under the porch rafters. He walked to the car, wedged the urn beside his suitcase, closed the hood with a clunk and then leaned to latch it shut.

  Only when he was about to switch on the ignition did he realize Lydia had not told him about the nail, or where it might be, or that the keys belonged there. The nail was not visible unless you looked from a certain odd angle.

  He had just known.

  And so had Lydia, apparently.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE NIGHT WAS cold in Marin and he did not fancy a drive south, only to return in the morning. Besides, he would have to conserve his scant ten dollars. So he stopped at a gas station and asked the night attendant, a young Asian woman locked in a fluorescent-blue booth, how to find San Andreas.

  She stared at him speculatively from her bright little island. “The fault, or the prison?” she asked.

  “I’m going to the prison tomorrow,” Peter said.

  She cocked her head to one side, coquettish. “You not look like a bad man,” she said. “You mature, not punk.” She added, “Prison closed. They build.”

  “Right,” Peter said. “High-tech office buildings.”

  “I not know.” She looked up the directions in a Thomas Brothers guide, glad to have company this late at night, and apparently glad it was Peter. He often had that effect on people, and especially on women. Lydia had nailed him. He might have led a different and more productive life if he had been a little less charming.

  “Also, I need a good beach,” he said. “Nice waves.”

  “This the Bay, no waves,” the woman said.

  Peter shrugged. “Anywhere close?”

  “Maybe Point Reyes.”

  “That’s good. Is there a YMCA nearby?”

  “YWCA more fun, maybe?” She shook her short black hair and covered a giggle with her hand. “But I think one in San Rafael. I find.” And she looked that up by going to the Web on her booth computer. “It get so boring here after ten, I go nuts,” she said. “I travel all over the Web. Owner not mind. He my brother. You think he set me up with some nice man? No! I work work work long hours. Get off late.” She glanced hopefully through the bullet-proof plastic.

  Peter rewarded her with a wry smile. “My friend’s ashes are in the trunk,” he said. “I’m taking him down to the beach.”

  That sobered her right up. She watched owlishly as he returned to the car with directions to the YMCA on Los Gamos Drive.

  First, however, with the moon still up and the night still bright, and enough gas in his tank, it was time to send the last of Phil back to nature.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE WIND OFF the Pacific lifted sand from the beach in translucent sheets and sent it shushing through scrub and low trees. The moon was at its highest point and Peter could clearly make out the waves, long rough rollers grumbling in from an unhappy ribbon of black sea. Sand got in his eyes. He had thought of standing on a rock and dispensing fistfuls of his friend’s ashes to a wide swath of ocean, but that clearly was not going to be practical. “Let’s choke the fishes, not me,” he murmured, pulling up the collar of his coat to keep the sand out of his eyes.

  Carrying Phil’s urn, he walked down as close to the waterline as he thought practical, then danced back as the spume hissed forward with unexpected energy. After a few tries, he found a good compromise position, stooped, unscrewed the thick plastic lid, and waited for the foaming burble of ocean to creep back. The best technique, Peter thought, would be to apply Phil a dollop at a time. Pouring out the contents of the tub all at once would leave a gray wet lump to be worked over like the stub end of a wet cigar. Not good.

  Peter dispensed the gritty ashes in small handfuls. After five minutes, his ankles and knees ached. He thought of all of Phil’s maladies: Heartburn, the beginnings of emphysema from so many years of smoking—Phil had smoked like a chimney, said it made him feel normal. A mole on his chin and beside his nose. An attack of shingles. Nerves in social situations.

  In 1987, Phil had been a joyous, leering wreck at the Playboy Mansion. To calm him, Peter had sat him down at a table and pulled out a sketchpad. Together they had performed dueling cartoons until well past midnight. Phil’s characters had been quickly sketched Everyman nebbishes with long noses and knowing eyes. Peter had drawn more detailed, world-weary devils with little horns and wry expressions. Right and left, cartoons had been handed out to a growing crowd of beautiful women and envious men. Hefner had sat with them for a few minutes, and later had published several of the cartoons. The checks had totaled over six thousand dollars. Phil had called that his finest moment.

  He had suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Not washing his hands over and over, but making sure light switches were turned off, appliances that might overheat were unplugged. Peter had once waited twenty minutes while Phil had checked his apartment, unlocking and then relocking the door ten times. Coffeemaker, TV, space heaters, all had to be off or unplugged, because you never knew where an electrical
fire might start, and Phil was fanatic about protecting his stuff.

  Peter tossed another fistful into the foam, staying out of the blowback as wind sang over the waves. He then crab-walked down the beach, another dollop, another step.

  He had researched cremation for the horror film that Joseph had refused to finance. In older crematoria, bodies often had to be turned and poked and rearranged to be burned clear to ash. It was a tough, low-paying job, taking tongs and turning the hot, smoking bodies. Sometimes the heart, a tough hard lump of muscle meat, had to be picked out and hammered or ground up separately.

  Or so some funeral planners had told him over drinks at a bar on Cahuenga.

  “Jesus,” he murmured, and bent to let the spume wash his hand. “The things I’ve done for you, Phil. I swear.”

  But it felt right. It was worth it. He could imagine Phil liberated from nerves and pain and bad memories. But the waves were also dissolving Phil’s weird, crackpot humor and eyes gleaming as he talked about finding a rare pulp in excellent condition at Collector’s Bookstore. The cold salt water, filled with breaking, hissing bubbles, was also sucking up the Phil that had waved his arms and laughed as they had discussed the stops on their Old Farts Escapade and Tour. “Pismo Beach. Albakoykee, Lompoc, and Cuc-A-MONGA-a.”

  Gone also, the inner experience that had driven Phil to express himself about Peter’s loss, tears rolling down his cheeks. “Shit, Peter, you never deserved anything this bad, never.” Peter had almost quaked himself apart with grief in Phil’s arms. Two grown men, hugging and crying.

  The spume glowed pale as it drew the muddy last of Phil out to sea. Peter wiped sand and spray and fresh tears from his eyes and trudged back up the beach to the parking lot. It was four in the morning. Except for the Porsche, the parking lot was empty. He was too tired and wrung out to make it to the YMCA. He drove the car out of reach of the salt spray and sand and parked on a bluff. Then he curled his arms up in the tight bucket seat and leaned his head against a small pillow he carried to sometimes sit on.

  With Phil gone, he had almost nobody to talk to. Being alone for this long was the worst kind of failure, something he had always tried to avoid, usually with considerable success. Before his marriage, there had of course been lots of women, but also lots of friends. And quite a few who had been both.

  Phil, however, had always been there for the worst times. No more. No more.

  He dreamed in vivid jerks about the keys on the string. They hung before him, suspended from someone’s hand, a man’s, not Lydia’s, as clear as could be, caught in golden light. Even the dirty string was Titian red.

  Then he woke and turned to see dawn glowing over the hills behind the freeway. His glasses lay folded on the dash. All the world outside was a blur. The ocean looked blue-gray and cold. His mouth tasted foul. He stank of salt water. There were cars on the road now. He couldn’t just step outside and pee.

  He heard a knock on his window, as light as a tapping fly. A grizzled old man bent to peer in at him.

  “Nice car,” the old man was saying.

  Peter blinked and rubbed his eyes. “Thanks,” he murmured, reaching for his glasses. They slipped from his fingers and dropped between the seats.

  “Porsche, right?” The old man’s voice sounded miles away.

  “Yeah,” Peter answered, neck hair pricking. He was feeling that tug again, the same wrench of demand he had sensed emanating from the image of Lydia in Phil’s bedroom.

  “She’s a beauty, such a cutie, and from the rear, she looks like bootie. How about a ride?”

  The old man kept talking. It took several seconds for Peter, still unable to find his glasses, to realize that while the background of the parking lot, the ocean, and surrounding trees was blurred, the old man was in fact crystal clear, almost painfully etched with detail. Behind him stood three children. The children were waifs, thin and pale, hardly there at all.

  One of them climbed on a guardrail and did a balancing act, then jumped into the air and blew away like smoke.

  “Young’uns grow three by three,” the old man observed, “hang like monkeys from a tree.”

  Peter frantically felt between the seats while at the same time trying to keep his eyes on the old man, who smiled with sardonic benevolence.

  “Lonely out here, ain’t it?” the old man said. “What I need is some of that ol’ Smoky Joe, twist, cut, or blend. Got some for a dear old friend?”

  Peter felt the tug now sharp as a fishhook snagging his chest. His hand found his glasses and he straightened his knees, shoving himself hard upright in the seat.

  “Tough old world. Smoky Joe. Helps you see what you should know.”

  Peter pushed the glasses over his nose, nearly poking his eye with a temple piece. The scene outside did a sickening reverse—the landscape became sharp and clear, but the man and the children suddenly lost detail. They looked ragged, not in dress but in form—dead but not decayed—not in the least like corpses, more like marble statues, faces worn smooth by long years of acid rain.

  The old man’s eyes were gray shadows, the nose a cartoon bump.

  “Go away!” Peter shouted. His voice cracked. “You aren’t there!”

  The old man jammed shapeless clay hands flat against the window. The tug hauled Peter so hard against the door that he bruised his arm.

  “Come on, Peter,” the gray man said, his voice like insects trying to slap through the glass. “Give us a break, don’t be slow. Give me that ol’ Smoky Joe. We all know what you don’t know.”

  Then he started over again, exactly like a scratched and dirty record skipping to the beginning of the same old song.

  “Nice car.”

  The waif jumped up on the guardrail, did a balancing act, blew away like smoke.

  They were about to repeat the whole scene, with all the same lines, all the while tugging, tugging, sucking on what he was and what he knew like a lollipop, getting off on the sugar, the sweetness. Peter’s thoughts turned slow and cold. He needed to get away, needed to chill the heat behind his eyes before it scalded.

  He turned the key. The motor sounded like an old oil can rolling and rattling in a drum. Each cylinder laboriously ascended its round well, compressing a spume of gas, then—BANG—trudged down to expel a dead fume. He could make out every slowly working piece of metal in the sequence. His ears felt as if they were stuck in Jell-O.

  As he slipped the car into reverse and let out the clutch, the figures performed a frame shift, swinging beside him like transparent overlays on a theater screen.

  Adrenaline kicked in. Time sped up. The tires spun and dug in and the Porsche’s rear end waggled, kicking up a rooster tail of gravel. Peter toed hard on the pedal and roared and bucked onto the freeway, narrowly missing a red pickup and a big old Buick. The drivers honked and flipped him off. He did not care. He drove fast—eighty, ninety miles an hour—for ten miles, weaving through the early-morning traffic with squealing tires and drifts of rubber smoke, very unlike Peter Russell.

  Two more near-collisions brought him to his senses.

  At an old-fashioned garage with four rounded pumps and an antique red Pegasus, he pulled over and stopped, grabbed the shift into neutral, set the parking brake, and tried desperately to stop shaking. He strained at the shoulder harness.

  The motor chugged and whined steadily behind him. Little puffs of blue smoke curled from the end of the tailpipe. He would need oil soon, he thought. The mundane world was returning, but now it had a real edge. The whole car smelled rank. He could not go to a business meeting like this. He was soaked. Gratitude for small favors—he had not shit his pants. Still, he was breathing okay. He was intact, not scattered across the freeway, with bits and pieces ground under the tires of an eighteen-wheeler.

  He was alive.

  He had to make himself presentable. His brain worked at high speed, using energy left over from the fear.

  Taking up the Trans, Peter spoke a number—a phone number—from memory. He had to say it t
wice, his voice was so shaky. Desperate times called for humiliation and retribution, in that order, probably.

  A woman’s throaty, sleepy voice answered.

  “Jessie, it’s Peter. Forgive me. I need your help.”

  “Forgive you?” Jessie responded, her words languorous, as if she were lying back in bed. “Never. You are an unutterable creep. Where are you?”

  CHAPTER 14

  SHOW BUSINESS HAD long ago taught Peter that some men and women should not get old. Perhaps it was looking in the mirror and predicting trends that had pushed Marilyn and Elvis into drugs and death: critical inspections of neckline, midsection, upper arms, tummy, thighs. For the heartachingly beautiful, too reliant on the love of a fickle public, putting on a few autumn pounds for the coming winter was more horrible than being nailed into a coffin.

  She’s fat.

  She’s dead.

  Dead was better.

  For a woman like Jessie EnTrigue, the rules did not apply. Personality had trumped age. Peter had known her when she had been the loveliest nineteen-year-old in the exploitation-film business, a fresh face with a suppliant, beautiful body and sufficient brains to pick a decent agent and move on to some decent films. She had grown nicely from a soft-core princess to establish a lasting reputation as a scream queen.

  In 1970, she had starred in one of Peter’s better youthful efforts, Rising Shiner. They had lived together for six memorable months, and then she had packed up and moved on to better roles and better directors. “Things just aren’t piggy anymore,” she had told him.

  By “piggy” she had meant interesting and a little perverse.

  Decades later, growing large in thigh and bosom, she had played mature as an asset and became the sexiest horror-movie matron in town. Then she had quit altogether, when she could still claim it was her decision. Roles were still being offered. Peter had met her several times since at psychotronic film festivals—the last venue for old talent or talent that had never quite made the cut. They had exchanged Christmas cards once or twice.