Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  Christ, I hated him worse than his father. He wouldn’t shut up.

  We were high above the coal smoke of shipping and the concrete sneeze powder of the construction zone. The Channel Heights development offered sun-washed views of the outlying area and tantalizing blue glimpses of the Pacific. The brightly-colored bungalows followed meandering lanes up the hillsides. The houses peeked out coyly from desert trees, and each property sported a well-tended lawn and garden. Ethan, of course, had insisted on a guided tour of the whole construction project.

  “Were you in the war?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Air Corps?”

  “Marines.”

  “Oh, rough stuff, then? Planes are fabulous. The next war I recommend planes. Jets. Astro rockets by then, right? I’ve been in planes since the Great War. Really enjoy flying. Like knights of the skies. Really swell. I could have sworn you were in planes.”

  “You might be thinking of Beau Reynolds.” The drive was making a wind sock of my necktie, and it kept snapping into my face.

  “Perhaps so.” Ethan shifted gears as we went over another ridge. “I’ll admit, and take no offense at this, that I get you all mixed up quite easily.”

  Channel Heights defied the frame-house standard of Bishop-brand suburbanization. I’d bet it was a favorite spot on every tour Ethan gave, home to the engineers, scientists, skilled technicians, and project architects from the San Pedro Atomic Power Station.

  “This is all very nice,” I said. “Nicer than I expected.”

  “You probably pictured Power Town.” Ethan gestured between the trees at the distant work camps. “Murrow has been quite the shit about it. All of those radio bums. You know we employ, house, and feed a hundred thousand? Sure, there’s going to be some bad apples in there. Some troublemakers.”

  I’d heard the same broadcasts as Ethan. The thousands working on the APS construction crews were bivouacked in temporary dormitories in Wilmington. The rows of long, whitewashed bunkhouses were separated by shoddy canteens, company stores, and shower blocks. I’d heard the dorms were overcrowded and uncomfortable. The workers living in them had little expectation of privacy.

  The real story, the one in the papers too, was that over two years of construction, a boomtown’s barnacle economy of cheap booze shacks and chow houses and gaming halls had sprung up around the periphery. Crime was rampant. The politicians liked to blame the handful of Negro workers, but I knew it was the cops patrolling the Wilmington work camp who brought in the whores and drugs. The fortunate men who saved enough money to leave the camps probably moved into one of Harlan’s other housing developments.

  Down along the channel road we raced the laden sardine trawlers with their wheeling coteries of gulls and the cargo ships bound for the bustling port facilities. In addition to materials specific to the construction site the freighters carried fruit from South America, minerals from the Far East, and a steady stream of cultural trinkets and cheap goods churned out by the less civilized world.

  Trucks and locomotives waited to receive the cargo and transport it across the country. Bishop had his hand in every step, from the manufacture of the locomotives and trucks, to ownership of the overland freight companies like Mastiff Logistics, to building and maintaining the skeletal goliaths of the gantry cranes offloading boxcars directly onto the train carriages. Even viewed at a great distance, across the sun-silvered shipping channel, the port facility was a bracing example of modern man’s achievements.

  It was dwarfed by the scale of the San Pedro Atomic Power Station. Ethan told me the men who worked it called it the Pit. I recognized it all from the model in Harlan Bishop’s office. The hyperbolic cooling towers appeared first above the urban clutter, the central tower foremost among them, a goliath among goliaths, but each a concrete-paneled stack that loomed over all other buildings in sight. Even the distant hills and mountains seemed like berms to these five enormous structures. The industrial traffic swallowed up the little convertible. My view was blocked by the back of a truck, and choking fumes and dust blew unpleasantly into my face.

  “Just a little farther,” said Ethan. “There’s an access road up ahead for visitors.”

  Until we reached the access road, traffic snarled all approaches leading to the site. Ethan explained there was a railhead inside the APS bringing in steel and fuel, but day and night construction required endless convoys of Mastiff trucks hauling in concrete and tools and flatbeds laden with machinery. White motor coaches conveyed workers between Power Town and the Pit.

  We passed through a checkpoint manned by men in gray police uniforms. Ethan guided the convertible onto a two-lane strip of road hemmed in by fences and leading directly to an exclusive underground parking structure.

  “This is where the men from Channel Heights park,” said Ethan.

  We donned hard hats bearing red miter logos and climbed aboard a white jeep converted to run on electric. The vehicle tunnels of the under works were smooth and well-lit by fluorescents and smelled of grease. Regular, color-coded signs were hung from the tunnel ceiling and pointed the way to various locations. Maintenance Hub, Level 9, Level 15, Level 20, Desalination South. Ethan turned the jeep down the tunnel toward the Desalination works.

  He described the Pit as we traveled. Boring technical details that I tuned out. Intake from underground tidal chambers, steam from the turbines used to heat the multistep desalinators. Twenty thousand gallons an hour. Closed system impervious to radioactive contamination. Output fed into a cistern and pumped into the city water supply every sixty minutes following quality checks. Blah, blah, blah. I would have caught up on my sleep if I thought he wouldn’t have noticed.

  “Aren’t people worried about the radiation sickness?” I asked.

  “These aren’t bombs in here.” Ethan laughed ruefully. “The panic about radiation poisoning is ridiculous. Irresponsible politicking by the Democrats and their friends in the oil and coal industries.”

  “People like Senator Paulus?”

  “Yes. Yes, exactly him. Very shrewd of you to spot his kind. He’s a homosexual, you know.”

  “Didn’t know that,” I said. I’d never believe a charge of homosexuality from a snake like Ethan or his father. Homosexual was one of those words spit by certain people when they wanted to call somebody a Red, but they couldn’t prove it.

  Ethan parked the jeep, and we toured the stages of the desalination works. The smell of seawater was intense on the top level, and the tidal action of the inflow tunnels produced a steady susurration that traveled through the pipes and ended in a pressurized thud.

  At the bottom stage, the ninth, we sampled water from paper cones. The test reactor was operating in non-generating mode, but it produced enough electricity to run test cycles on the desalination equipment. Full operations on all four reactors were still at least six months away.

  “I am impressed.” It was true. The scale was humbling.

  “I will show you one of the reactors under construction,” said Ethan. “They have already brought in the payload on west, and south is our operating test reactor. North is still under construction. You can see the reactor pool. Go for a swim if you’d care to.”

  “Look, let’s skip it. I get it. You are building the top dog of power plants. Jobs for California. I’m on board, and I appreciate your rolling out the red carpet and all, but I need to talk to you about a case.”

  “The Holly Webber business, yes. All right. We can speak in my office.”

  We drove in silence past the Reactor East and various maintenance tunnels and downward ramps to deeper portions of the under works. We drove under a red sign with bold white lettering. RESTRICTED PYLON, ARMED GUARDS ON DUTY. Ethan caught me staring at it.

  “Waste storage,” said Ethan. “We store it in lead-lined chambers below the water table to avoid any chance of contamination. The Undercroft Vault. Only a few personnel are allowed into the deep Undercroft, and we guard it with bonded security at all times.”

>   I could tell he was lying, but I didn’t know how. Not until later anyway. We ventured to the surface and the modern luxury of Ethan’s office on the sixth floor of the redbrick control building. I sat in a creaking chesterfield drinking a black tea from China. A difficult place to get exports from at the moment with all the business in Korea, but I’m sure it was a trivial matter for the Bishops.

  The picture window behind Ethan’s desk provided him with a view not of the reactors but north toward Hollywood. The afternoon was slowly receding into evening. The sun was less merciless, and the angled light was golden. Shadows of the mullions stretched across Ethan’s arm and the side of his face in a distorted grid.

  I put the bitter tea down in its saucer and said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I wanted to begin by asking you a question about your lineage.”

  “I am Ethan Bishop by way of Harlan Bishop.” Ethan opened a humidor on his desk and took a pair of Robustos out. He offered me one, but I waved it off.

  “And it’s like that with all of you?” I asked, and I took out my black book. “All of you who have been Ethans, I mean.”

  He didn’t seem to take offense at my jab.

  “We all diverge at various points from him, but we are never second generation. Never a duplicate of a duplicate. I was chosen to take on the role of Ethan Bishop in 1948.”

  “You mean to say that in 1948 you were a spontaneous duplicate of Harlan Bishop; you recalled his life up until the moment you diverged. “

  “Not exactly. I emerged in 1942 but was kept on standby in Spark until I was needed.” He glanced at my pen and black book. “You know that is how it works. I remember telling you all this when I was Harlan Bishop.”

  “Of course, my apologies. We Warrens struggle with identity more than you Gideons. “

  “We’re Bishops now,” he corrected me sternly.

  “Sure, right. So, has your father told you anything about Holly Webber?”

  “No. The first time I heard that name was earlier today. I was rather surprised you wanted to meet after we spoke on the telephone. I don’t think I’ll be of much help.”

  “I disagree.” I reached into my pocket and brought out an envelope. I passed it over to him. As he opened it, I continued my questioning. “What can you tell me about your relationship, as Harlan Bishop, with Isabella Webber?”

  He looked up from the film clippings in his hand, and slowly a smile spread across his face.

  “But this isn’t Harlan Bishop at all,” he said. “This is one of you. What are you playing at here?”

  “It is a Warren,” I agreed.

  “Remarkable that this woman looks like Annabelle, but this is not Harlan Bishop.”

  “Right,” I said as he slid the pictures back to me, “it’s a Warren, like you said. On the set of the only film being produced at that time at Royal Radio Pictures. Harlan Bishop’s film company.”

  Ethan leaned back in his chair and finally lit his cigar. The tip of it pulsed red within a growing cloud of smoke.

  “I loved her, of course.” Ethan spoke around the cigar, slipping easily into his remembered life as Harlan Bishop. “She was every bit Annabelle. I imagined God had secreted her in our midst as some sort of joke.”

  Jealousy. Maddening jealousy, in a cauldron, overflowing my veins and burning into my face, my hands. The pain of my broken fingers was forgotten. The stones in my lungs. In that moment it took every scrap of my willpower not to rise from my chair and throttle the miserable life from Ethan Bishop.

  “So how did she end up with your father?”

  “Now, now, she didn’t, not so far as I know. The last I can recall was 1942, and she was still with that Warren in your little picture. He was off fighting the war, but there was no charming her away from him.”

  “What was his name?” I asked.

  Ethan rolled his eyes up and looked at the ceiling.

  “I can’t recall. Was it Beau Reynolds? No, that’s the pilot you mentioned earlier. I’m sorry, I’m positively terrible with remembering which of you is which.”

  “Do you know how she was cast for Rex Rawhide?”

  “That Warren came to me, said it was her dream. He worked for me a bit, doing odd jobs here and there, so of course I said yes. I was always looking for talent. Commercial actresses, film stars. Father has given it all up, but I cast a wide net over the studios. They send me the reels of every pretty girl to come through their doors.”

  “Do you still have her reel?” I asked.

  He wallowed in the smoke for a long while before answering. “I’m afraid I don’t, but you could always ask my father.”

  “Your father lied to me about all this,” I said. “How did Isabella Webber die?”

  “I don’t know. I expect you’ll need to ask the Warren in that frame about all that.”

  “What about her daughter, Holly Webber?”

  Ethan leaned forward, emerging from the cloud of cigar smoke like the prow of a warship from fog. “I never saw her daughter. She always sent her away when I was around.”

  “You never looked for her daughter?”

  “I didn’t. My father may have.” He resumed puffing on his cigar, then added, almost as an afterthought, “Just our luck, right? To always come upon her after she’s dead?”

  “It’s a tragedy,” I said.

  “If you think murder is afoot, I encourage you to get to the bottom of it all. I would have my revenge on the person responsible for taking her from us again.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “We’re all working for the same thing, Mr. Cord.” Ethan’s expression was making me feel queasy.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He smiled and said like I already should know, “The future.”

  I vomited in the gravel outside the maintenance door. Orange and brown and swirled with blood. Couldn’t tell if it was from Ethan’s smile, the lingering revelations from the Paramount vault, or my beat-up guts. Mad as I was, I decided to blame it on the beating. I heaved three times and walked away from it, flushing the taste from my mouth with a flask of whiskey from my coat. I walked over to a chain-link fence facing the car park where my Tudor was baking and leaned heavily against the metal. The Stillman was in my car. I could walk out to it, come back, and fill Ethan Bishop full of lead.

  Nah. The Bishops had leaped into my spot as number one suspects, and they’d certainly been revealed as liars, but their killing Holly Webber didn’t make any sense. If they’d found out she was alive, why run her down out in Cranford? Clearly they were still obsessed with her. And I still had not the slightest idea as to why she’d have my name on a piece of paper.

  There was a dark shape moving beyond the chain-link. Emerging from a hidden entrance out among the cars. A broad-brimmed black hat, desert sun shades, a long black overcoat. A face melted like wax. That son of a bitch was out there. I didn’t like the odds it was a coincidence. The big freak was working for one of the Bishops.

  I stuffed the flask back into my coat and ran for the gate. I wasn’t sure what I’d do—I clearly couldn’t fight a man like this one—but I had to do something. By the time I made it around to the gate and charged in among the parked cars, he was gone. No, there was his massive Cadillac, wheeling around to leave.

  I had to run in the other direction. My old coupe was lost somewhere in the candy-painted sea of parked automobiles. Sweat beaded my head, and I was wheezing, but I did not relent. The Cadillac was almost to the gate. I was panicked, breathless, and I found it. I collapsed into the hot tomb of the car and backed it up, nearly kneecapping some workers headed for their cars. The tires screeched as I made for the gate.

  By the time I emerged onto the access road, I was sure I’d lost him, but there he was, several blocks away. The Cadillac was a battleship among a stop-and-go flotilla of frigates. I joined the queue of workers leaving for the evening. The russet curtains of the sky were closing over the sea, the sun in my eyes. The pursuit became a jerky, slow-motion affair as I at
tempted to maneuver up the lines of cars exiting the Pit, but we were all bottlenecked and waiting to leave.

  My gun was out and sitting beside me on the seat. The prolonged tension of the traffic jam had me checking and rechecking its cylinders, careful to keep it hidden from the view of the surrounding commuters. My body was cold with sweat, and every song on the blaring car radios was annoying me.

  We finally cleared the logjam, and traffic began to flow again. The Cadillac was headed west on the One, following the coast through Long Beach and past the Seal Beach Navy base. I’d spent years following Covenant breakers and cheating husbands, before that real crooks, so I was able to keep my distance and stay out of sight even when the Cadillac turned off the One at Sunset Beach and entered a residential neighborhood.

  I followed the Cadillac into a beautiful, tree-lined neighborhood full of some of the biggest bungalows I’d ever seen. It reminded me of a richer Hawthorne, where Lynn and I lived. An exclusive sort of place.

  Each house was a little different than the others around it—different angles, gables, unusual brick attachment—not the suburban sameness Bishop was exporting. There were kids playing in the yards. Men clipping the grass. Women sitting in spring-backed chairs, well-heeled and happy, queens watching the evening settle romantically over their kingdom.

  And me, an outsider, dripping with blood and covered in bruises, an old black car full of cigarette smell and whiskey, a loaded gun in my lap. I was the interloper. Not the Cadillac that purred silently past the houses and turned into an asphalt drive. An automatic garage opened and swallowed up the car. I stopped on the street.

  Was he working for Ethan? His henchman? Or was it Harlan he answered to? Someone was paying the monster well for him to have a house like this. A pink bungalow with dark shades pulled down over the windows, it faced inland, but it was a short walk to the beach from here. I could hear it, faintly. Beckoning.

  A police car rolled past. Local uniforms. They shot a concerned look at my old Ford, at me. Time to move along, they said with their eyes.