Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  “Just a sec. Hey,” the man said away from the phone, “it’s the Parganas kid!” More loudly, he added, “It’s Koot Hoomie!”

  The phone at the other end was put down with a clunk on something hard. In the background Kootie could hear a lot of people talking, and a clatter like a cafeteria. He heard glass break, and a voice mumble “Fuck.”

  There was a rattling on the line as someone picked up the distant phone. “Koot Hoomie?”

  It was his mother’s voice! She was alive! He was sobbing again, but he managed to say, clearly, “Mom, come and get me.”

  There was a moment of relative silence, broken only by mumbling and clattering at the other end; then, “Kethoomba!” his mother exclaimed. (Was she drunk? Was everybody drinking there in the dispatcher’s office?) Kootie remembered that Kethoomba was the Tibetan pronunciation of the name of the mahatma his parents had named him after. She had never called Kootie that. “Gelugpa,” she went on, “yellow-hatted monk! Come and get me!”

  “Gimme that phone,” said someone in the background. “Master!” came the quavering voice of Kootie’s father. “We’ll be out front!” Quietly, as if speaking off to the side of the receiver, Kootie’s father asked someone, “Where are we?”

  “Fock you,” came a thick-voiced reply.

  “Dad,” shouted Kootie. “It’s me, Kootie! I need you to come get me! I’m at—” He poked his head out into the breeze and tried to see a street sign. He couldn’t see one up or down the gray street. “They trace these calls, ask the dispatcher where I’m calling from. Have ’em send a cop car here quick.”

  “Don’t go outside!” called his father to someone in the noisy room. “Cop cars!” Then, breathily, back into the mouthpiece: “Kootie?”

  “Yes, Dad! Are you all drunk? Listen—”

  “No, you listen, young man. You broke the Dante—don’ interrupt—you broke the, the Dante, let the light shine out before anything was prepared—well, it’s your son, if you mus’ know—”

  Then Kootie’s mother was on the line again. “Kootie! Put the master back on!”

  Kootie was crying harder now. Something was terribly wrong. “There’s nobody here but me, Mom. What’s the matter with you? I’m lost, and that guy—there’s bad guys following me—”

  “We need the master to pick ’s up!” his mother interrupted, her voice slurred but loud. “Put ’im on!”

  “He’s not here!” wailed Kootie; his ear was wet with wind-driven tears or sweat, and chilly because he was now holding the phone several inches away from his head. “I called. My name is Koot Hoomie, remember? I’m alone!”

  “You killed us!” his mother yelled. “You broke the Dante, you couldn’t wait, and then the … forces of darkness! … found us, and killed us! I’m dead, your father’s dead, because you disobeyed us! And now the master hasn’t called! You’re bad, Kootie, you’re ba-a-ad.”

  “She’s right, son,” interjected Kootie’s father. “Iss your fault we’re dead and Kethoomba’s off somewhere. Get over here now.”

  Kootie couldn’t imagine the room his parents were in—it sounded like some kind of bar—but he was suddenly certain of what they were wearing. The same formal wedding clothes.

  In the background there, a little girl was reciting a poem about how some flower beds were too soft … and then a hoarse woman’s voice said, “Tell him to put Al on, will ya?”

  Kootie hung up the phone. The wind was colder on this street now, and the sky’s gray glow made opaque smoke of the windshields on the passing cars.

  His quarter clattered into the coin-return slot. Apparently there was no charge on 911 calls.

  And ten blocks east of Kootie, leaning against bamboo-pattern wallpaper at the back of a steamy Thai takeout restaurant, Sherman Oaks pressed another pay-telephone receiver to his ear.

  At the other end of the line, a man answered, recited the number Oaks had called, and said, “What category?”

  “I don’t know,” said Oaks, “Missing Persons? It’s about that kid, Koot Hoomie Parganas, the one on the billboards.”

  “Koot Hoomie sightings, eh?” Oaks could hear the rippling clicking of a computer keyboard. “You speak English,” the operator noted.

  The remark irritated Oaks. Probably he had always spoken English. “Most people don’t?”

  “Been getting a lot of Kootie calls from illegal immigrants: ‘Tengo el nino, pero no estoy en el pais legalimente.’ Got the kid, but got no green card. Looking for a second party to pick up the reward. There must be fifty curly-haired stray kids locked in garages in L.A. right now. One of ’em might even be the right one, though he hasn’t been turned in yet, or this category would be closed out. Okay, what? You’ve got him, you know where he is? We’ve got a bonded outfit checking all reasonable claims, and a representative can be anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area within ten minutes.”

  “What I’ve got,” Oaks said, “is a counter-offer.” He looked around at the other people in the tiny white-lit restaurant—they all seemed to be occupied with their takeout bags and cardboard cartons, and even the obtrusive smells of cilantro and chili peppers seemed to combine with the staccato voices and the sizzle of beef and shrimp on the griddle to provide a screen of privacy for the phone. “You know smoke? Cigar? The Maduro Man?”

  “It’s a different category, but I can call it up.”

  “Well, I can put up—” Oaks paused to pull his attention away from the bright agitation of the restaurant, and he ran a mental inventory of the three major caches he kept, hidden out there in corners of the dark city; he pictured the dusty boxes of empty-looking but tightly sealed jars and bottles and old crack vials—he even had a matched pair, an elderly matrimonial suicide pact, locked up in the two snap-lid receptacles of a clear plastic contact-lens case. “I can put up a thousand doses of L.A. cigar, in exchange for the kid. Even wholesale that’s a lot more than twenty grand.”

  He heard more keyboard clicking. “Yeah, it is.” The man sighed. “Well, for that we’d need a guarantor, somebody we’ve got listed, who can put up forty grand. Counter-offers have to be double, house policy. If we get that, we’ll go ahead and list it under the Parganas heading. But the guarantor would have to do all the other work, like maybe putting a trap on the reward-number phone and being ready to intercept anybody who, you know, might already have the kid and be trying to get the original reward. I don’t have to tell you that hours count in this one. Minutes, even.”

  “I know.”

  Oaks looked down at the compass in the pommel of his knife—right now it was pointing up in the direction of Dodger Stadium, which was plain old north, but a few minutes ago it had joggled wildly and then, for what must have been nearly a full minute, pointed emphatically west. After that it had wobbled back to north, and he hadn’t seen it deviate from that normal reading since.

  During it all, he had felt no heat in his absent arm—but the compass had clearly registered a brief re-emergence of the big ghost; and the ghost had been in the excited state, too, for ghosts didn’t cast the huge magnetic fields when they were in their normal quiescent ground state. It was clathrated in the boy’s psyche, and not dissipated or eaten. Oaks was achingly anxious to get off the phone and resume his jogging pursuit—westward!—but this insurance was worth a minute’s delay.

  “So who’s your guarantor?” the man on the phone was asking him. “Or do you have forty grand yourself, to put up instead of your smoke?”

  “No, not me. Uh …” The street dealers he ordinarily sold to wouldn’t have this kind of money ready to hand. He would have to go higher up. “You got a Neal Obstadt listed?” Oaks asked. “Under gambling, probably, I think that’s his main business.”

  “Yeah, I got Obstadt.” (Clickety-click.) “What do I tell him? Even for him, forty ain’t just lunch money.”

  Oaks had heard Obstadt described as a heavy user, a good customer who was generally able to score the best specimens in the dealers’ stocks. “Tell him it’s from the guy named
Sherman Oaks, the producer who brought you such hits as—I hope you’re taping this?”

  “Always got a loop going.”

  “Such hits as Henrietta Hewitt, the old lady who died on September fifth and whose kids were named Edna and Sam.” It was a fairly long shot, but old Henrietta had been the best ghost Oaks had bottled lately, and anyway Obstadt might very well recognize Oaks’s name and reputation. He might not, but the possibility of changing the Parganas listing was definitely worth this delay.

  “I’ll play it for him. I imagine he’ll want to tape your voice himself, as your receipt for the money, if he goes for it. Are you at a number?”

  “No, I’ll call back in an hour. But if he authorizes it, you can list it on the board right now, can’t you?”

  “Yup. As soon as he says okay, it’s on, and the … mere mercenary details are between you and him.”

  “Go,” said Oaks, and hung up the phone.

  Immediately he wondered if he was making a costly mistake. He could easily get to all of his stashes within a hopping hour or two, but turning it all over to Obstadt’s people would leave Oaks with approximately nothing. He might even have to kill a few street people to make up the full thousand bottled doses. But of course he wouldn’t have to cough up the smoke unless he received the Parganas boy, and the big ghost inside the boy was clearly worth a thousand ordinary bottled dead folk. The nightly fresh catches in his traps would keep Oaks going until he could build up reserve stocks again.

  He could feel his missing arm again, but it was just clutching his chest, and it was as uselessly cold as if it were, cradling a bag of ice. He actually looked down at his grubby shirtfront, and was remotely surprised not to see the fabric bunched by the clawed fingers. His compass was still pointing north—either the ghost was in the normal catatonic ground state, or was reimprisoned inside the boy’s psyche, or both.

  The burning-plastic smells of sizzling shrimp and cilantro helped propel him across the linoleum floor and out onto the Figueroa sidewalk.

  Oaks despised the processes of biological ingestion and digestion and elimination, and he generally lived on crackers, and bean soup fingered up cold and solid right out of a can, and water from unguarded hoses and faucets. His real sustenance was his ghosts, snorted up raw and new and vibrant from a hand-lettered palindrome or a pile of scattered coins, or—occasional serendipitous luxuries!—furtively inhaled in hospital corridors or from a body freshly tumbled on the street.

  He remembered stalking the halls of County Hospital during the war, when every one of the hundreds of windows had been painted black in case of a Japanese air raid, and the ghosts of newly dead patients were too fearful to dissipate normally, and instead huddled in the corners of the halls, always faintly asking him, as he swept them into his bottles, “Are the Japs out there?” … And the maternity ward at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where he had often been able to inhale the fresh-cast virtual ghosts thrown off by newborn infants in the stress of birth …

  But it was now getting on to forty-eight hours since he had last “got a life”—which had been before he’d gone to the Parganas house. He hadn’t even bothered to consume the ghosts of Kootie’s parents after he killed them, so confident had he been that the big ghost must still be nearby; he had not wanted to waste the chase-time by pausing to eat those two minor items.

  Out on the sidewalk he realized that the day had turned cold, and that the gray light would be diminishing toward evening before too long. Already the zigzag neon sign of a shoe store across the street was glowing yellow against the ash-colored wall. An orange-and-black SCE truck roared past, and he flinched away—from the roaring of it.

  Those two minor items. Oaks would have been grateful for one such minor item right now. One lungful of real soul food, to keep away the Bony Express.

  For he could feel the unrest of the ghosts he had consumed in the past. When he was forced to fast, they all became agitated, and his exhalations were more and more audibly wheezy with their less and less distant roars, as if they were all riding toward him—the Bony Express!—ever closer, over the midnight black hills of the unmapped borderlands of his mind, toward the lonely middle-of-nowhere campfire that was his consciousness.

  His phantom left hand had crawled down his chest and now gripped his abdomen, squeezing so hard that Oaks was wincing as he hurried west along the Sixth Street sidewalk. He thought of making a detour, catching a bus up to—which stash was he nearest to?—the rooftop air-conditioning shed over the hair salon on Bellevue; but the thought of how strongly the compass needle had pointed west only a few minutes ago, and the memory of the collapsed face on the parking garage stairs at the Music Center, made him keep on putting one foot ahead of the other on the westward-leading sidewalk.

  Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, with Koot Hoomie Parganas’s body still twitching under him in protest at being so newly dead, and the two souls, the boy’s and the big ghost, blasting hotly down Oaks’s windpipe to his starving lungs.

  Soon, he thought.

  CHAPTER 21

  “The little fishes of the sea,

  They sent an answer back to me.”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass

  THE SUN WAS UNDER the skirts of the dark clouds now, showing briefly on the western edge of the world before disappearing below the silhouetted hills of Pacific Palisades. Pete Sullivan was sitting by the leaded-glass window of Kendall’s Sport Time Bar, and the long, horizontal rays of sunlight glowed red in the depths of the Guinness stout in the glass on the polished table.

  He was waiting for his order of appetizers—fried mozzarella with marinara sauce, and Buffalo chicken wings with celery and blue-cheese dressing—but he had got the stout in the meantime because a teacher at City College had once told him that Guinness contained all the nutrients required to sustain human life. It was thick and brown and rich, though, and he planned to switch to Coors Light as soon as he had emptied this glass and thus fulfilled his health duties. And this bar somehow didn’t have any smoking area at all, so his next cigarette would have to wait until he got back into the van. A healthful evening all around.

  Television sets were hung at several places in the darkness under the ceiling beams, but each one seemed to be tuned to a different channel, and the ones with the sound turned up loud weren’t the ones closest to Sullivan. On the nearest screen he watched presidential candidate Bill Clinton moving his lips, while what he heard was whining electrical machinery and mechanical thumping from a farther speaker. Sullivan looked away.

  His hands were still sticky from having washed them with Gojo hand-cleaning jelly at the tiny sink in the van. This morning, after driving around to pick up supplies, he had found an unfenced dirt lot east of Alameda, among the windowless plastic-works and foundries by the train tracks and the cement-walled Los Angeles River, and he had done some work on the poor old van.

  The sun had still been glaring out of a clear October sky, and he had taken off his shirt and scapular and popped a beer from a fresh twelve-pack before opening the van’s back doors and dragging out his tools.

  The tire pressures were low, so he hooked up a little electric air pump to the battery with his jumper cables, and crouched beside each tire in turn, puffing a cigarette and sipping the chilly beer, and watched to make sure the cable clamps didn’t touch each other as the pump wobbled and vibrated on the adobe dirt. Then he crawled under the van and dumped the oil, conscientiously draining the old black stuff into the kind of sealable plastic container that could be taken to an oil-recycling center, though unless someone was watching he intended to leave the container right there in the middle of the field. A new oil filter, new spark plugs, and six quarts of Valvoline 20-50-weight oil finished the job.

  L.A. air in the tires, he thought, and fresh oil in the engine. Nothing with any memories of fleeing Arizona—of driving to Houdini’s wrecked old place—of fearfully crossing borders. And he remembered the old notion that after some number of ye
ars every cell in a human body had been replaced, every atom, so that the body is just a wave form moving through time, incorporating just for a little while the stuff of each day; only the wave itself, and none of the transient physical bits, makes the whole trip. Even a scar would be no more significant than a wobble still visible in an ocean wave long after the wave had passed the obstruction that caused it, while the water molecules that had actually sustained the impact were left comfortably far behind.

  A.O.P., Sullivan thought now as he sipped his cloying Guinness. Accelerate Outta Problems. He had always been uneasy watching people dig in—the newlyweds committing themselves to a mortgage and a roof and plumbing, the brave entrepreneur leasing a building and getting boxes and boxes of letterhead printed up. Sullivan had owned the van for five years now, but he had owned other vehicles before that, and he would own others after the van met whatever its eventual terminal problem would turn out to be; the very books on the shelf over the top bunk were a wave form—paperbacks that were bought new, became bent and ruptured and yellowed, and eventually served as ragged whiskbrooms that went out with the trash they swept up, to be replaced by new paperbacks.

  Sullivan had once read some Greek philosopher quoted to the effect that no man can step into the same river twice, because it’s never again the same river, and he’s never again the same man.

  Thank God for that, Sullivan thought now as he beckoned to the waitress. On the nearest television screen, in front of some shabby house draped in yellow police-line tape, a concerned-looking newsman was frowning into the camera and opening and closing his mouth, seeming, because another set was turned up loud on a different channel, to be barking like a dog while someone kept saying, “Speak!”

  Sullivan looked back down at the table. It was better with just the sound. Today he had set up his portable radio and cassette deck on the van floor, and on the noon news he had heard that some giant prehistoric fish had washed up on the shore at Venice Beach, and that lobsters had crawled out of the ocean and terrified people on the shore.