Dead Lines

by Greg Bear

  Peter tried to conceal his unease.

  Michelle walked to the center of the foyer. Her voice seemed to fan out and come from all around. “Joseph once told me something terrible happened here, but he won’t say what.”

  “Murder most foul,” Peter suggested.

  “Yes, well, more likely an orgy went wrong. Lost innocence, drugs, Coke bottles. Fatty Arbuckle stuff.” She smiled. “But it’s not in the history books or the newspapers, so who knows? Maybe you can pry it out of him.” Then she made a moue. “On second thought, forget it. He’s not up to sad stories.”

  Joseph hasn’t told her about ending my employment, Peter thought.

  “You know the tunnel between the houses? With the tracks and little cars?”

  “I’ve never been down there.”

  “I think we’re going to fix it up. Clean it out and make it run again.” Michelle gave him another blank look. For the first time, Peter felt that she was lying, and he could not begin to guess why.

  “Come into the kitchen,” Michelle suggested. “It’s the best place.”

  “I’d better not,” Peter said. His curiosity had evaporated. “I’ve got to run my errand.”

  “Be that way,” Michelle said lightly enough, returning to stand close. “Did you bring your Trans?”

  He hadn’t. “I think they’re having network problems,” he said. The truth was, he had simply forgotten it on the way out of the house.

  “Well, maybe that explains it,” Michelle said. “I haven’t told Joseph, but the units don’t work inside either of the houses. Wouldn’t want him to think we’ve bet his money on a lame horse. Are you all right?”

  “Just cold. I’d better get moving,” Peter said.

  Michelle wrapped her arms around herself. “It is chilly. And she does show better when the sun is shining.”

  Outside, she became Joseph’s Michelle again, comradely and straight. She patted his arm. “Don’t let that woman bum you,” she advised, standing by the driver’s door as he buckled himself in. “Sandaji’s turned Joseph into a pill, I’m sure of it. Trying to get more money, I bet. I just don’t like her.”

  Peter said he would do his best to protect Joseph from predatory gurus. He tried to smile but his face just wouldn’t cooperate, so he gave her a wry grimace and a wink. Then he backed up and left Michelle standing on the long, cracked concrete drive, before the huge old house with its high Alamo-style peak and second-floor rows of narrow, deep-set black windows.

  Not like eyes. Like the gaps between stained teeth.

  CHAPTER 34

  JEAN BASLAN OPENED the door. Without a word, she let him in and motioned for him to wait in the living room. He carefully sat on an antique Morris chair and folded his hands. He heard her short hard heels clicking across the dining room and down the hall.

  Peter turned his head at a small sound behind him. An extremely elderly man stood by a square pillar supporting one half of the archway into the living room. He wore a blue cardigan buttoned at the belt, loose, baggy pants, and a white shirt, and above his high forehead, a brush of gray hair jutted. Round glasses covered rheumy gray eyes. Narrow shoulders slumped like folded wings and long arms hung with elbows bent slightly, hands gripped as if practicing a golf swing.

  With a small, shy smile, he stepped gingerly around a spray of dried flowers in a large ceramic vase and sidled along the edge of the coffee table.

  “Sandaji will join us shortly,” he said, his voice soft and deep. “My name is Edward Schelling.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Peter said, standing and offering his hand.

  Schelling shook his head apologetically: no touching. “Brittle bones,” he said. “Compared to you, I’m like a piece of glass.” He let himself down onto the couch with a release of locked joints, and slumped alarmingly to one side before sitting upright again. He managed all this with great dignity.

  “It’s been many years since Sandaji last spoke to me,” he said. “Something of a privilege now, that we should be afforded an audience.”

  “Costs some people plenty,” Peter said.

  Schelling raised his brushy white eyebrows in agreement. “For being such a spiritual woman, security in this life is very important to Sandaji. Still, let us not be catty.” He paused and leaned his head back to inspect the woodwork on the ceiling. “Do you remember being told that she is not a psychic?”

  “I remember.” Peter needed to understand what was happening here. Was he still representing Joseph, or had that relationship been tossed aside? “You’re an old friend?”

  “I am not an acolyte, if that’s your question,” Schelling replied. He lifted his shoulders briefly, then let them sag back. They might have been connected by springs, or weighed down by time. “We were married once, in another life. Sorry, I’m not being clear. In this life, but before she was Sandaji.”

  Peter silently opened his mouth, Ah.

  “She will not be staying here much longer. The house and what is in it have become too much for her. Still, it will be a major inconvenience to move. This is an important time of the year. Many visitors.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Peter said.

  “May I ask you an odd question?”

  Peter lifted the corners of his lips.

  “Are you psychic?”

  Peter drew back. “No.”

  “Have you recently experienced suspicions, odd feelings . . . sensations? Or induced the same in others?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. . . .” Peter had forgotten his name.

  “Schelling.” The old man’s eyes were very bright. He reminded Peter in some ways of a superannuated Dashiell Hammett, or perhaps Faulkner.

  “I’m not sure why you’re asking,” Peter said.

  Both men turned their heads. Sandaji walked with slow dignity into the entry, as if seeking distance and time to inspect Peter. Schelling’s neck crackled. He pulled back his shoulders with more conviction and stood. Peter followed suit.

  She wore a green velvet gown with a dark bronze belt, as if trying out for the role of Ophelia in a geriatric version of Hamlet, and she looked thinner, older; the beautiful radiance from that first meeting had diminished. Still, even with the force of her presence so reduced, it took Peter several seconds to notice Jean Baslan standing to one side, hands tightly clasped.

  Having performed her inspection, Sandaji finished her walk into the living room and offered her hand to Peter. “Is Edward giving you the proper third degree?” she asked, her stance belying her tone: light and conversational. Peter clasped her hand and felt something like reassurance pass between. Uneasy, he rejected it without even thinking. He had dealt with charismatic women before; he had also watched them disrobe and assume undignified postures.

  Schelling observed their touch with bleared, sad eyes.

  Sandaji stepped around the table to the couch. She took a seat as her former husband stepped aside, his bony knees cracking.

  “We’re getting along famously,” Schelling said. They stared at Peter with lips pressed together, hands clasped in their laps, like children in the principal’s office—two shy, wise children, a matched set. Figurines in a bizarre antiques shop.

  “Joseph Benoliel asked me to come visit him,” Sandaji said. “After my troubling experience here, with you, Mr. Russell, I wondered if it was wise to comply.”

  “Mr. Russell says he is not psychic, my dear,” Schelling explained. “I assume that means he is not responsible for the continuing disturbances.”

  Sandaji raised her hand in rather abrupt dismissal and focused on Peter, leaning slightly forward while still keeping her back straight.

  “For the last two days, I’ve been seeing ghosts,” she said, her beautiful eyes fixed on Peter’s. “Memories drifting like smoke, but pervasive. Impressions from outside the house, bits of interior dialog, not words so much as images or smells, rarely sounds. And other sensations I cannot explain at all. My body feels moments of exaltation and sadness, moving within me, from other moments i
n other lives. As well, phantasms of other bodies—sensations within my organs, my muscles, on my skin. Often, I itch without cause. It can be embarrassing.”

  Despite his concealed distress, perhaps because of it, Peter could not help laughing. “That is weird,” he said.

  Sandaji joined his laughter for an instant, charmingly, and then with a long flutter of her lashes, straightened her face. “I have seen myself, as I will be or have been in this house. That frightens me, because of stories my great-grandmother told me when I was a little girl. She warned that seeing yourself is tantamount to learning you will soon die.”

  “Remarkable,” Peter said. The hair on his neck was now fully erect.

  “Mr. Benoliel offered us another large sum of money to come out to his estate. Apparently, something is troubling him. After I made my decision, I enlisted the aid of Mr. Schelling. Has he told you that he is, in fact, psychic?”

  “We’re not on such intimate terms yet,” Peter said. He looked at Schelling. “Are you going out there?” he asked.

  “Oh, we have already made our visit. Yesterday,” Schelling said.

  Peter stared between them, mouth open. “I was just there. Joseph didn’t say anything about you.”

  “I presume he wishes all this to be kept close to home,” Sandaji said. “But by sending you, I presume he has also given permission for us to speak. He places some confidence in you. He has been disturbed recently, but he could not tell us why, or by what.”

  “What did he see?” Peter asked.

  Sandaji lifted an eyebrow at this choice of words, but did not answer.

  “Sandaji is not alone, nor is Mr. Benoliel, in being disturbed,” Schelling interrupted. “Today, Jean and I witnessed a child standing right here in this living room. He was clutching a toy fire engine. His clothing was not of the latest fashion, and he was most certainly neither alive, nor physically present.”

  Peter glanced up at Baslan. She nodded, face pale.

  “Usually, even with my abilities tuned to the strongest degree, I see nothing more than wisps, hints, figures in the corner of my eye,” Schelling continued. “This time, however, it was as if we had both put on a new pair of glasses. Our little boy was as vivid as you are right now. What I saw made me want to weep. An intimacy, a truth . . .” Schelling shook his head, his eyes growing even more watery. “Most remarkable.”

  Peter swallowed hard. The pause between this sentence and the next seemed unbearably long, and he did not know if he could bear to wait, or stand to hear whatever might come from Schelling’s lips.

  The elderly man’s voice dropped to a soft, rumbling stentor. Now he sounded angry, as if describing an affront to their dignity. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out something oblong wrapped in tin-foil, and laid it on the table. “We visited Mr. Benoliel, and his wife—we assume it was his wife—gave us this when we left.”

  His long, thin fingers could not muster sufficient dexterity to unwrap the foil, so Sandaji did it for him. Before she had finished pulling off the last of three layers, Peter saw clearly that it was a Trans—a bright-red unit.

  “It’s some sort of phone, isn’t it?” she asked Peter.

  “Yes,” Peter said. He tongued the gap between his teeth. “Joseph invested in the company.”

  “You carried one of these with you when you first visited Sandaji, did you not?” Schelling asked.

  “I think so,” Peter said. He remembered touching the Trans in his pocket, alongside the roll of hundred-dollar bills. “Yes, I did.”

  “That could explain quite a lot,” Schelling said, blinking slowly. “You confirm my worst suspicions.”

  Sandaji said, “You’re hiding something, Mr. Russell. Are you sure that you, too, haven’t been seeing ghosts?”

  Schelling did not wait for an answer. He held the Trans to his ear as if listening to a seashell and fastened an even sharper look on Peter. “These devices produce a remarkable effect,” he said. “A certain extraordinary silence. And then something unexpected . . . Like the rising of a curtain before a hidden stage. I, for one, am very frightened by what may be happening to us all.”

  Peter felt as if his tongue had jammed against the roof of his mouth. Everyone is hiding something. And some things are no longer hiding from anyone.

  Baslan, now at Peter’s elbow, obligingly offered him a bottle of Evian. He opened the sealed cap and took a sip, nodding his thanks. For her part, she continued to regard him as if he were a strange and threatening animal that had been set loose in the house.

  CHAPTER 35

  SANDAJI TOOK SCHELLING by the elbow and helped him through the kitchen to the back door and outside. Peter followed. They stopped by a large oriental stone lantern at the meeting of two perpendicular paths. “A few special people,” she said, “have the ability to see deep into roiled waters. Sometimes it’s because of what they are, sometimes it’s because they have been involved in extraordinary events.”

  Peter was remembering the sensation he had felt before opening the door to Phil’s bedroom. I do not want to know.

  Jean Baslan closed the porch door, pulling on a blue sweater, and ran down the steps to join them. The rain had stopped for the moment but the sky was still clouded over, threatening. The large backyard was ornamented by clumps of sword grass and papyrus neatly arranged in undulating, brick-walled planters. A Japanese-style teahouse rose above the grass in the back corner of the lot, angled to face the garden; the rice-paper doors were open and lanterns burned inside and along the steps. Order, beauty, calmness; none of which he could share, not now.

  “These are special people,” Sandaji said as she helped Schelling up the steps of the teahouse. “Some are like saints. Others . . . not saints. They have extraordinary skills, and some do not realize what they can do. Edward has met them. He also happens to be one of them.”

  A deck chair had been set on the tatami mat floor. Schelling sat stiffly. “You still haven’t answered our questions,” he said through a wheeze. Cushions provided seating for Sandaji; Peter remained standing, arms crossed in defense, feeling both dread and embarrassment.

  “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  “We’re not enemies, Mr. Russell,” Sandaji said.

  “I just don’t know what’s true and what isn’t,” Peter said.

  Schelling lifted his eyebrows and scrutinized Peter’s face.

  Sandaji looked distressed. “Why don’t you trust us, Mr. Russell?”

  “Because you take money from lonely people, people in pain,” Peter said.

  “Hospitals and doctors take money,” Sandaji said. “I treat a different kind of illness.”

  “Well, you wrap it in fake charm and piety. Maybe that’s why I don’t trust you.”

  Schelling seemed about to stand in defense of his former wife, but Sandaji placed a restraining hand on his knee before the joint had a chance to pop. “It’s a living,” she said, eyes dancing. “I believe what I tell people. I truly do relieve their pain and give them peace. And what do you do for a living, Mr. Russell?”

  “I take pictures of naked ladies,” Peter said. “And make movies.”

  Schelling’s jaw fell. He had remarkably straight, corn-colored teeth, all his own, it seemed. “I’ll be damned,” he said, and looked aside either in indignation or in embarrassment.

  “I see,” Sandaji said, with as much aplomb—and no more—as if he had said he was a lawyer. “Edward, remember when I posed for your box camera?”

  “We are straying from the topic,” Schelling said.

  “How old were you, my dear?”

  “Sixty-two,” Schelling answered, throat bobbing.

  “A lovely time,” Sandaji said. “I was quite the young beauty. And you, my dear,” again she patted Schelling’s knee, “were very artful, like another Edward I once knew—Edward Weston. Your photographs, Mr. Russell, are for young men who lack female company,” Sandaji said, peering up at Peter like a schoolgirl. “Do we not both peddle dreams of happiness?” />
  Peter could picture himself standing with arms crossed, jaw stuck out like Il Duce; a graying genie in a Hawaiian shirt and a beige coat spotted by rain. She could see right through him, and make him know it. “Art for art’s sake,” he said.

  Sandaji laughed. Edward, still looking to one side, began to laugh next. Peter tried to keep a straight face, but the tension and the situation—and Sandaji’s charm—drew him in.

  He had begun with Michelle; why not tell all to these two, these extraordinary antique figurines? Because they’re no better than palmreaders. You can’t ever go there again. It would kill you.

  And yet, here you are.

  “Perhaps Mr. Russell is right not to trust us, my dear,” Schelling said. “What can we offer him that he needs?”

  “Mr. Russell needs to talk, and soon, or he will burst,” Sandaji said. “Perhaps we should begin, however.”

  “Have we not already begun?” Schelling asked, perplexed.

  “Not at your beginning, my dear. And how long did it take you to reveal that particular tale?”

  “Decades,” Schelling said, mouth working.

  Jean Baslan had gone back to the house, and now returned with a tray, carrying a pot of tea in a knit cozy and four fine china cups.

  “It’s obvious you understand something about life,” Sandaji said to Peter. Baslan noiselessly set the tray on a small sandalwood table. “What do you know about death?”

  THE RAIN BEGAN again as drizzle, and soon surrounded the teahouse with a rushing downpour. The roof rumbled and water cascaded from the edge of the tiles and out of the gutters, gathering in furious puddles and stooping the sword grass and papyrus. It had not rained so hard in months.

  “I lost my daughter. I buried my best friend. I don’t know much at all,” Peter finally answered, his strong, thick fingers absorbing the cup’s heat.