Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  “If everybody minded their own business,” sniffed deLarava, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”

  Obstadt suspected that her line was a quote from one of the Alice-in-Wonderland books. Loretta liked old smokes that had hung around hotel lobbies for decades; Obstadt preferred them fresh. It was the old ones that quoted Alice all the time. Among the solid old bum-smokes on the street, the Alice stuff seemed almost to be scripture.

  He was driving between the broad dark lawns of the Veterans Administration grounds now, with the Federal Building to his left and the cemetery to his right.

  “Is it that fish?” he asked, taking another bite of the cookie. “Did you get outbid by the fish-market man at Canter’s?” So much for your bid to be the Fisher Queen, he thought—in spite of all your vegetarianism, and your “youth treatments,” and your Velcro instead of buttons and topologically compromising buttonholes.

  “What are you eating?” deLarava demanded. “Don’t speak while you’re chewing, you’re getting crumbs in my ear.”

  “Through the phone? I doubt it, Loretta.” Obstadt was laughing, and in fact spraying crumbs onto his lap. “It’s probably dead fleas. Don’t you wear a flea collar under your hair?”

  “Jesus, it’s sand! Grains of sand! Has he been whispering to me while I napped? But I’ll eat him—”

  The line clicked, and then Obstadt heard the dial tone.

  He replaced the phone in the console cradle, and his smile unkinked as he drove under the freeway overpass, the cemetery behind him now. You spend all day at the beach, Loretta, he thought, you shouldn’t be surprised to find sand in your ear.

  Loretta was crazy, beyond any doubt. But—

  Something big had happened last night, at around sundown; he had had to excuse himself from dinner at Rusty’s Hacienda in Glendale and go stand on the sidewalk and just breathe deeply and stare at the pavement, for all the ghosts he’d snorted up over the years were clamoring so riotously in his mind that he couldn’t hear anything else; the Santa Ana wind had strewn the lanes of Western Avenue with palm fronds, and Obstadt had squinted almost fearfully southwest, over the dark hills of Griffith Park, wondering who it was that had so abruptly arrived on the west coast psychscape.

  The intensity had faded—but now the street-smokes were all jabbering and eating dirt, and some kind of dinosaur had washed up in Venice, and deLarava couldn’t stop crying.

  Loretta’s a clown, he had said this morning. She wins chips in this low-level game, but never cashes ’em in to move up to a bigger table; still, some big chips do sometimes slide across her table; and she’s all excited about one now.

  He stomped the gas pedal furiously to the floor, and bared his teeth at the sudden roar of the engine as acceleration weighted him back against the seat.

  The fish? he thought; some Jonah inside the fish? The guy that maybe left the state? Nicky Bradshaw?

  Who?

  CHAPTER 22

  The snoring got more distinct every minute, and sounded more like a tune: at last she could even make out words …

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass

  AND WAY OUT EAST at the other end of Wilshire, out where multicolored plastic pennants fluttered along nylon lines strung above used-car lots, where old brownstone apartment buildings still stood on the small grassy hills, their lower walls blazing even in the failing daylight with bright Mexican murals, where neglected laundry flapped on clotheslines in the grassless courtyards of faded apartment complexes built in the 1960s, Kootie stepped up a curb, limped across the sidewalk away from the red glow of a Miller Beer sign in a corner bar window, and rocked to a halt against the bar’s gritty stucco wall.

  He was still intermittently talking to himself, and during the walking of these last several blocks he had even begun moving his lips and whispering the dialogue.

  “I can’t walk anymore,” he panted. “I think I’ve ruined my foot—they’re probably gonna have to just cut it off and put a wooden one on.”

  “Duh,” he said thickly then, speaking for the absent ghost of Thomas Alva Edison, which he was certain he had left behind in a mess on the stairs at the Music Center, “well, I got wooden teeth. No, that was George Washington—well, I got a wooden head.”

  “I saw your head,” Kootie whispered, his voice shaky even now as he remembered that shocking period of dislocation. “It was made out of old strips of beef fat.” He mouthed the last two words with, it fleetingly occurred to him, as much revulsion as his vegetarian parents would have done. He jumped hastily to the next thought: “I’m gonna go in this bar—no, not to get a cocktail, you stupid old fart!—I’m gonna get somebody to call the cops for me.”

  Kootie was still holding the quarter that the pay telephone had given back to him two hours ago. He had been gripping it between his first two fingers and tapping it against the palm of his hand as he had walked. The rhythm of the tapping had been unconsidered and irregular, but now, probably because he had a purpose for the coin again, the tapping was forcefully repetitive.

  “I don’ wanna go in the bar,” he said in his dopy-old-Edison voice, and in fact Kootie didn’t want to step in there. The memory was still too fresh of the lunatic phone call with—with what, exactly? The ghosts of his parents? It had been that, or it had been a hallucination. And his parents had seemed to be in a bar.

  But if somebody else made the telephone call …

  (He found himself picturing carbon; black grains in a tiny cell at first, with a soft iron diaphragm that would alternately compress and release the carbon grains, thus changing the conductivity; but the grains tended to pack, so that after a while the conductivity was stuck at one level …)

  If somebody else made the call it might go through, and not just be routed again to that bar from hell.

  That call an hour ago had started to get through—Kootie was sure now that the first voice he had heard had really been the 911 operator, for after he had walked away from the pay phone he had seen a police car drive past slowly in the right-hand eastbound lane of what had proved to be Sixth Street. Kootie had wanted to go flag him down, but had found himself hurrying away across the parking lot instead, and pushing open the glass door of the ninety-nine cent store, where he had then gone to the back aisle and crouched behind a shelf of candles in tall glasses with decals of saints stuck on the outsides.

  He must have been afraid, still, of facing the police and deciding which sort of crazy story to tell them.

  And then the shop manager had yelled at him, demanded to know what the boy was doing there, and in his feverish embarrassment Kootie had bought a bagful of stuff he hadn’t wanted, just to placate the man: a box of Miraculous Insecticide Chalk, a blister-pack roll of 35-millimeter film, and a Hershey bar with almonds. They were all things displayed right at the checkout counter. The bag was crumpled up now, jammed inside his lightweight shirt.

  When he had finally left the store and resumed limping east, away from the fading light, he had pretended that the imaginary ghost of Edison took the blame for Kootie having hidden from the police car. Duh, sorry, he had had the ghost say, but I can’t let the cops catch me—I’ve got library books that have been overdue since 1931!

  Now Kootie forced himself to push away from the wall and walk toward the bar’s front door. He was chilly in the smoky evening breeze with just the polo shirt on, and he hoped the bar’s interior would be warm.

  (A glass lamp-chimney, blackened with smoke. When the black stuff, which was carbon, was scraped off, it could be pressed into the shape of a little button, and that button could be attached to the metal disk. In another room you could bite the instrument it was connected to, and, through your teeth and the bones of your skull, hear the clearer, louder tones.)

  Kootie pulled open the door with his left hand, for the fingers of his right were still rapidly thumping the quarter into the tight skin of his palm. Tap … tap … tap … tap-tap-tap … tap … tap … tap …

  A
n outward-bursting pressure of warm air ruffled his curly hair—stale air, scented with beer and cigarette smoke and sweaty shirts, and shaking with recorded mariachi guitar and the click and rattle of pool balls breaking across bald green felt. Yellow light shone in the linoleum under his Reeboks’ soles as he shuffled to the nearest of the two empty barstools. The bartender was squinting impassively down at him over a bushy mustache.

  “Do you have a telephone?” Kootie asked, grateful that his voice was steady. “I’d like to have someone make a call for me.”

  The man just stared. The men on the barstools around him were probably staring too, but Kootie was afraid to look any of them in the face. They’ll recognize me from those billboards, he thought, and turn me in. But isn’t that what I want?

  “Teléfono,” he said, and in desperate pantomime he raised his left hand in front of his chin as if holding an empty Coke bottle to blow hoots on, while he held his right hand up beside his head, the fingers extended toward his ear. “Hel-lo?” he said, speaking into the space above his left hand. “Hel-lo-o?”

  His left hand was still twitching with the coin, and belatedly he realized that the rhythm it had been beating against his palm was the Morse code for SOS; and at the same time he noticed that he was miming using one of those old candlestick-and-hook telephones, like in a Laurel and Hardy movie.

  SOS? he thought to himself—and then, instinctively and inward, he thought: What is it, what’s wrong?

  An instant later he had to grab the padded vinyl seat of the barstool to keep from falling over.

  Kootie’s mouth opened, and for several whole seconds a series of wordless but conversational-tone cat warbles yowled and yipped out of his throat; finally, after his forehead was hot and wet with the effort of resisting it and he had inadvertently blown his nose on his chin, he just stopped fighting the phenomenon and let his whole chest and face relax into passivity.

  “Duh,” came his voice then, clear at last. “Du-u-h,” it said again, prolonging the syllable, indignantly quoting it. Then he was looking up at the bartender. “Thanks, boys,” said Kootie’s voice, “but never mind. All a mistake, sorry to have wasted your time. Here, have a round of beers on me.” After a pause, Kootie’s voice went on, “Kid, put some money on the bar.”

  Catching on that he was being addressed—by his own throat!—Kootie hastily dug into the pocket of his jeans and, without taking out his roll of bills, peeled one off and pulled it out. It was a five; probably not enough for very many beers, but the next bill might be a twenty. He reached up and laid it on the surface of the bar, then ducked his head and wiped his chin on his shoulder.

  “Lord, boy, a fiver?” said his mouth. “I bet they don’t get many orangutans in here. Who are these fellas, anyway, son? Mexicans? Tell ’em in Mexican that this was a misunderstanding, and we’re leaving.”

  “Uhhh,” said Kootie, testing his own control of his voice. “Lo siento, pero no yo soy aqui. Eso dinero es para cervezas. Salud. Y ahora, adiós.”

  “Oh,” he heard himself add, “and get matches, will you?”

  “Uh, y para mi, fosforos, por favor? Mechas? Como para cigarros?”

  After another long several seconds, the bartender reached out and pushed a book of matches forward to the edge of the bar.

  Kootie reached up and took it. “Gracias.”

  Then he could almost feel a hand grab his collar and yank him away from the bar, toward the door.

  (But even with the pressed carbon disk, if you were relying on just the current set up in the wire, there was clarity but no reach; all you had was a little standing system. To fix that, the changing current in the wire had to be just the cue for changes that would be mirrored big-scale in an induction coil. Then the signal could be carried just about anywhere.)

  “Trolley-car lines,” Kootie heard himself say as he pushed open the door and stepped out into the cold evening again. Standing on the curb, he waited for the headlights of the cars in the eastbound lanes to sweep past, and then he limped out across the asphalt to stand on the double yellow painted lines in the middle of the street. His head bent forward to look at the pavement under his feet. His mouth opened again, and “Find us a set of streetcar lines,” he said.

  “There aren’t any,” he answered—hoarsely, for he had forgotten to inhale after the involuntary remark. He took a deep breath and then went on, “There haven’t been streetcars in L.A. for years.”

  “Damn. The tracks make a nice house of mirrors.”

  Trucks were roaring past only inches from Kootie’s toes, and the glaring headlights against the dark backdrop of the neighborhood made him feel like a dog crouching on the center divider of a freeway; and briefly he wondered how Fred was.

  His attention was roughly shoved away from the thought. “After this next juggernaut, go,” said his own voice as he watched the oncoming westbound traffic. “Have they always been this loud?”

  “Sure,” Kootie answered as he skipped and hopped across the lanes after a big-wheel pickup had ripplingly growled past.

  On the north sidewalk at last, Kootie limped east, his back to the blurred smear of red over the western hills under the clouds. Of course he knew now that he had not lost Edison’s ghost after all, and he suspected that he had known it ever since he had involuntarily hidden from the slow-moving police car two hours ago; but the old man’s ghost was not shoving Kootie out of his body now, and so the boy wasn’t experiencing the soul-vertigo that had so shattered him at the Music Center.

  Actually, he was glad that the old man was with him.

  “Well now,” said his voice gruffly, “did you get the firecrackers?”

  Kootie’s face went cold. Had those firecrackers been important? Surely he had lost them along with everything else that had been in the knapsack or in the pockets of his heavy shirt—but then he slapped the hip pocket of his jeans, and felt the flat square package.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Good boy. Haul ’em out and we’ll squelch pursuit.”

  Kootie hooked out the package and began peeling off the thin waxed paper. The things were illegal, so he looked around furtively, but the TV repair shop they were stopped in front of was closed, and none of the gleaming car roofs moving past in the street had police light bars. “Why would an orangutan go into a bar?” he asked absently.

  “Sounds like a riddle. You know why the skeleton didn’t go to the dance?” Kootie realized that his mouth was smiling.

  “No, sir.”

  “He had no body to go with. Hardy-har-har. How much is a beer these days?” Kootie’s hands had peeled off the paper, and now his fingers were gently prizing the firecracker fuses apart. Kootie didn’t believe he was doing it himself.

  “I don’t know. A dollar.”

  “Whoa! I’d make my own. The joke is, you see, an orangutan goes into a bar and orders a beer, and he gives the bartender a five-dollar bill. The bartender figures, shoot, what do orangutans know about money, so he gives the ape a nickel in change. So the creature’s sitting there drinking its beer, kind of moody, and the bartender’s polishing glasses, and after a while the bartender says, just making conversation, you know, ‘We don’t get many orangutans in here.’ And the orangutan says, ‘At four-ninety-five a beer, I’m not surprised.’ ”

  Kootie’s laugh was short because he was out of breath, but he tried to make it sound sincere.

  “Don’t like jokes, hey,” said the Edison ghost grumpily with Kootie’s mouth and throat. “Maybe you think it’s funny having to pay four-ninety-five for a beer. Or whatever you said it was. Maybe you think it’s funny that somebody could be trying for an hour to tell you what you got to do, but your intellectual grippers ain’t capable of grasping any Morse except plain old SOS! Both times I proposed marriage, I did it by tapping in Morse on the girl’s hand, so as not to alert anyone around. Where would we be, if the ladies had thought I was just … testing their reflexes? I knew Morse when I was fifteen! Damn me! How old are you?”

  Koot
ie managed to pronounce the word “Eleven.” Then, momentarily holding on to control of his throat, he went on, defiantly, “How old are you?” What with being unfairly yelled at, on top of exhaustion and everything else, Kootie was, to his humiliation, starting to cry.

  “No business of yours, sonny.” Edison sniffed with Kootie’s nose. “But I was a year short of seventy when I bet Henry Ford I could kick a globe off a chandelier in a New York hotel, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Quit that crying! A chandelier on the ceiling! Did it, too. Did you see me kick that guy back there? What the hell have we got here?” Kootie’s hands shook the nest of firecrackers.

  “F-fire—” Kootie began, and then Edison finished the word for him: “Firecrackers. That’s right. Good boy. Sorry I was rude—I shouldn’t put on airs, I didn’t get my B.S. until I was well past eighty-four. Eighty-four. Four-ninety-five! Oh well, we’ll make our own, once we’ve got some breathing time. Breathing time. Hah.”

  Two black people were striding along the sidewalk toward where Kootie stood, a man in black jeans and a black shirt and a woman wearing what seemed to be a lot of blankets, and Kootie hoped Edison would stop talking until the couple had passed.

  But he didn’t. “You like graveyards, son?” Kootie shook his head. “I got no fondness for ’em either, but you can learn things there.” Air was sucked haltingly into Kootie’s lungs. “From the restless ghosts—in case the bad day comes, in spite of all your precautions, and you’re one yourself.”

  The black couple stared at him as they passed, clearly imagining that this was a crazy boy.

  “Leave no tracks, that’s the ticket. I did all my early research in a lab on a train. Take your shoes off. Daily train between Port Huron and Detroit; in ’61 I got a job as newsboy on board of it, so I could have a laboratory that couldn’t be located.” He sniffed. “Not easily, anyway. One fellow did find me, even though I was motivating fast on steel rails, but I gave him the slip, sold him my masks instead of myself. Take off your shoes, damn it!”