Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  On men in her life: “No, I—(laughter) physician heal thyself!—I think I’m still reacting against the machismo image of my father and my brothers. My father drank—I was thirteen when I figured out that his drinking was worst around February and March, when he’d get his vacation pay and his tax refunds—and he’d beat up my mother; and even on the farm out in Norco he always had to have steak and salad and a baked potato and a couple of glasses of wine at dinner, and silverware, while the rest of the family got rice and beans. And my brothers and their friends were … oh, you know, khaki pants, polished black shoes, Pendleton shirts buttoned only at the top button with white T-shirts underneath, hairnets with the gather-point in the middle of the forehead like a black spidery caste mark. Tough—all the firstborn boys are Something-Junior, and the fathers always had them out on the front lawn in a boxing ring made with a garden hose, sparring like fighting-cocks. And the boys and girls were supposed to get married and have kids as soon as possible. I’ve reacted against the whole establishment I was raised in, there—I’m not Catholic, I don’t drink, and I don’t seem to be attracted much to men. Oh—and not to women at all!—let me add. (Laughter.)”

  On why the crystal ball (if she’s so materialistic): “The stasis of the clarity, the clarity of the stasis—people look deeply for ghosts in pools where the agitation has passed. Tide pools seem to be the best, actually, literally, in eliciting the meditation that brings the old spirits to the surface; the sea is the sink of ghosts … that is, in the superstitious mind, mind you. Seriously, patients seem to find their ghosts more accessible in the shallow depths of actual ocean water. It’s been worth field trips. Eventually I’d like to move my clinic to some location on the beach—not to where there’s surf, you see, but pools of ordered, quieted seawater.”

  In the City College library, Sullivan had leaned back in his plastic chair and imagined the statements of a psychiatrist in some bucolic culture about a thousand years from now, when guns had survived as nothing but inert, storied relics: Because of the legends still adhering to the objects known as “Smith and Wessons,” I find that valuable shocks can be administered by pressing the “muzzle” of one such object against a patient’s temple, and then ritualistically pulling the “trigger.” I have here a specimen that has been perfectly preserved through the millennia … now, watch the patient …

  BOOM.

  Boom indeed, he thought now two hours later in the Miceli’s parking lot, as he finished his beer and dropped the cigarette butt inside the can. Well, she’s learned better. One of her patients must have been a ghost-connected person who acted as a primer, the charge being Halloween night and the hollow-point slug being a whole shitload of actual, angry, idiot ghosts. And the main target seemed to have been one of her patients who had died but hadn’t realized it yet, so that he threw posthumous shock-shells when his lifeline collapsed, igniting his overdue-for-the-grave body. And then two others died of heart attacks or something, and everybody else just plain went crazy.

  That must have been some night, Sullivan thought now as he levered open the van’s driver’s-side door and stepped down to the pavement in the chilly morning air. Well, maybe she’s learned better now; here she is back in town, and, unless I miss my guess, the reason she’s come back is to make amends—to a more literal sort of ghost than any she was willing to acknowledge when she gave that interview.

  If I can find Dr. Angelica Anthem Elizalde, he thought, maybe she could be talked into doing another séance. She knows how, and I’ve got Houdini’s mask, which has got to be big enough for both of us to hide behind. We could both deal with our ghosts from behind the mask, like Catholics confessing through the anonymizing screen in a confessional.

  As he trudged up the sidewalk beside the brick wall of Miceli’s, he wondered if Elizalde felt differently about the Catholic Church now. Or about drinking.

  Or even about men, he thought as he pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  Sullivan was sitting alone at a table down the hall from the entry and just taking a solid sip of Coors when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  He choked and blew beer out through his nose—and he dropped the glass, for his right hand had slapped his shirt pocket for the bag with the severed thumb in it and his left hand had darted to the loop on the fanny pack that would open the thing with one yank, exposing the grip of the .45 inside.

  “Jesus, dude,” came a startled, anxious voice, and a man stepped widely around from behind him, smiling and showing his hands self-deprecatingly. “Sorry!”

  Sullivan recognized him—it was an old college friend named Buddy Schenk. “I spilled my friend’s drink, sorry,” Schenk said, looking over Sullivan’s shoulder. “Could he have another? Uh—and I’ll have one too.” Schenk looked down at Sullivan. “Okay if I sit?”

  Sullivan was coughing hard, but could inhale only with strangled, whooping gasps. He waved at the chair across from him and nodded.

  “Beer in the morning,” said Schenk awkwardly as he sat down. “You’re getting as bad as your sister. And you’re jumpy! You went off like a rattrap! About gave me a heart attack! What are you so jumpy for?” He had unfolded a paper napkin from the table and was mopping up the foamy beer and pushing aside the curls of broken glass.

  Sullivan tried to inhale quietly, and was humiliated to find that he couldn’t. His eyes were watering and his nose stung. “Hi—Buddy,” he managed to choke.

  My God, I am nervous, he thought. If I’d known I was so scared of deLarava I would have sat with my back to a wall.

  He wished he could smell something besides beer, for suddenly he wanted to seine the garlicky air for the scent of clove cigarettes.

  The waiter who had earlier taken Sullivan’s order for a meatball sandwich walked up then, and swept the soaked napkin and the broken glass into a towel.

  After the man had walked away, Sullivan said, “Buddy, you asshole,” mostly to test his voice; and he could speak now. “It’s good to see you.”

  Sullivan discovered that he meant it. This was his third day back in Los Angeles, and until this moment he had felt more locked out of the bloodstream of the place than the most postcard-oriented tourist. It was a new Los Angeles, not his city anymore—the freeways didn’t work nowadays, Joe Jost’s was gone, Melrose Avenue was ruined, Steve Lauter had moved across the 405 and had guns pointed at his head, and the people Sullivan was most concerned about were dead people.

  “Well, it’s good to see you too, man,” Buddy said. The waiter brought two glasses and beer bottles to the table, another Coors for Sullivan and of course a Budweiser for Buddy. “How’s Twat?”

  Sullivan smiled uncertainly, not sure if he’d misheard his friend or if the question was some vulgar variation on How’s business? He looked over his shoulder and took a sip of beer carefully. “Hm?”

  “Sorry, Toot. We used to call you two Twit and Twat sometimes.”

  Sullivan’s momentary cheer was deflating, and he had another gulp of beer. “I never … heard that,” he said.

  “Well, you wouldn’t have. Hey, it was all a long time ago, right? College days. We were all kids.” Buddy laughed reminiscently. “Everybody figured Sukie had an incestuous thing for you, was that true?”

  “I’m sure I’d have noticed.” Sullivan said it with a blink and a derisive snort, but he found himself gulping some more of the beer. The glass was nearly empty, and he poured into it the rest of the beer in the bottle.

  The old shock was still a cold tingling in his ribs. (He had read that the weight of the Earth’s atmosphere on a person was fourteen pounds on every square inch of skin, and he thought he could feel every bit of the weight right now.) Sukie had been like the poor lonely ghosts, hopelessly trying to find that better half.

  Old Buddy sure has a winning line of remember-whens, he thought.

  “She’s dead,” Sullivan said abruptly, wanting to put a final cold riposte to Buddy’s thoughtless needling before it went any further. “Sukie—Elizabeth—ki
lled herself. Monday night.”

  Buddy frowned. “Really? Jesus, I’m sorry, man. What the hell have you—that’s why you’re alone. Were you with her? I’m real sorry.”

  Sullivan sighed and looked around at the Pompeii-style murals on the high walls. Why had he come here? “No I wasn’t with her, she was in another state. I’m just in town for … business and pleasure.”

  “Sex and danger,” agreed Buddy cheerfully, apparently having got over his dismay at the news of Sukie’s suicide. Sullivan remembered now that for the few months that Buddy had stayed with them in ’82, he’d always remarked, upon going out in the evening, Off for another night of sex and danger!—and when he’d drag back in later he’d every time shrug and say, No sex. Lotta danger.

  “No sex,” Buddy said now, grinning, “lotta danger. Right?”

  “That’s it, Buddy.”

  “You’re having lunch, right? Lemme join you, it’s on me and we’ll eat ourselves sick, okay? Whatever you ordered already is just the first course. We’ll drink to poor … Sukie. I’m supposed to be meeting a guy at noon, but I’ll call him and put it off till three or so.”

  Sullivan was already tired of Buddy Schenk. “I can’t be staying long—”

  “Bullshit, you’re staying long enough to eat, no?” Buddy was already pushing back his chair. “Order me a small pepperoni-and-onion pizza, and another beer, when you get your refill, okay?” He was calling the last words over his shoulder, striding away to the hallway where the telephone was.

  “Okay,” said Sullivan, alone in the dining room again.

  He was agitated by the conversation about Sukie. And the insult to himself! Twit and Twat! And he was sure that he and Sukie hadn’t picked up the Teet and Toot nicknames until … the early eighties, at the earliest. So much for the we were all kids disclaimer. It’s not just thoughtless—why is he jabbing at me this morning?

  Sullivan tried to recall when he’d last seen Buddy. Had Sullivan said or done something rude? Sukie might have. Sukie could probably be counted on to have.

  His beer was gone, and he looked around for the waiter. A pepperoni-and-onion pizza, he thought, and another Bud and maybe two more Coorses. It’s always been Bud for Buddy.

  Even the waiter had known it.

  Sullivan’s hands were cold and clumsy, and when he accidentally banged his fingers on the edge of the table they seemed to ring, like a tuning fork.

  How had the waiter known it?

  Oh hell, Buddy had probably been in here for a while, and this one hadn’t been his first. Or maybe he was a regular, these days. Sullivan breathed deeply and wished he had gone somewhere else for lunch.

  Why was Buddy hanging around drinking beer at Miceli’s when he had a noon appointment somewhere? Miceli’s wasn’t the sort of place one ducked into for a quick beer.

  Maybe the appointment was for lunch right here at Miceli’s, and Buddy had arrived early to drink up some nerve.

  Through the high window overlooking Cherokee, a beam of morning sunlight lanced down onto the tabletop and gleamed on a stray sliver of broken glass.

  Sullivan had certainly jumped, when Buddy had tapped him on the shoulder; grabbed not only for the gun but for Houdini’s mummified thumb, too. What had he been afraid of? Well—that deLarava had found him.

  Maybe deLarava had found him. Who was Buddy calling?

  Jesus, he thought, taking a deep breath. Where’s that waiter? You need a couple of beers bad, boy. Pa-ra-noia strikes deep. You meet one of your old friends in one of your old hangouts …

  Both of which deLarava would have been aware of, just as she’d been aware of Steve Lauter. Maybe there was no one I knew at Musso and Frank’s, day before yesterday, just because that was Sukie’s and my personal place. We never went there with anybody else, so deLarava wouldn’t have known to plant an “old friend” informer there.

  If Buddy’s here to betray me, he might very well want to pick a fight, to justify it to himself.

  Sullivan stood up, walked around the table and sat down in Buddy’s chair, facing the entry.

  Are you seriously saying, he asked himself as his fingers tingled and he took quick breaths, that you believe deLarava has planted an old friend at each of your old hangouts? Restaurants, bars, parks, theaters, bookstores? (Do I have that many old friends? Maybe the roster is filled out with strangers who’ve each got a picture of me in their pockets.)

  Oh, this really is paranoia, boy—when you start imagining that everybody in the city has nothing in mind but finding you; imagining that you’re the most important little man in Los Angeles.

  But I might be, to Loretta deLarava. If she really wants to capture and eat my father’s ghost. And she has money and power, and the paranoid insect-energy to put them to directed use.

  O’Hara’s in Roosevelt, Morrie speaking, he thought, remembering his flight out of Arizona on Monday night, after Sukie’s call. He had calculated then that it would take less than half an hour for bad guys to get from the nuclear plant to O’Hara’s.

  He thought: How quickly can they get here, today?

  Warning—you are too close to the vehicle.

  Sullivan was out of the chair and walking toward the front door and feeling in his pocket for the keys to the van.

  “Pete! Hey, where you going, man?”

  Sullivan pushed open the door and stepped out into the chilly morning sunlight. Behind him he heard Buddy yell, “Goddammit,” and heard Buddy’s feet pounding on the wooden floor.

  Sullivan was running too.

  He had the van key between his thumb and forefinger by the time he slammed into the driver’s-side door, and he didn’t let himself look behind him until he had piled inside and twisted the key in the ignition.

  Buddy had run to a white Toyota parked two slots away; he had the door open and was scrambling in.

  Sullivan jerked the gearshift into reverse and goosed the van out of the parking slot, swinging the rear end toward Buddy’s Toyota; the Toyota backed out too, so Sullivan bared his teeth and just stomped the gas pedal to the floor.

  With a jarring metallic bam the van stopped, and Sullivan could hear glass tinkling to the pavement as the back of his head bounced off the padded headrest. Luckily the van hadn’t stalled. He reached forward and clanked the gearshift all the way over into low and tromped on the gas again.

  Metal squeaked and popped, and then he was free of the smashed Toyota. He glanced into the driver’s-side mirror as he swung the wheel toward the exit, and he flinched as he saw Buddy step out and throw something; a moment later he heard a crack against his door and saw wet strings and tiny white fragments fly away ahead of him. Then he was rocking down the driveway out onto Cherokee amid screeching rubber and car horns, and wrenching the van around to the left to gun away down the street south, away from Hollywood Boulevard. He slapped the gearshift lever up into Drive.

  He caught a green light and turned left again on Selma, and then drove with his left hand while he dug the Bull Durham sack out of his shirt pocket. Feeling like a cowboy rolling a smoke one-handed, he shook the dried thumb into his palm and tossed the sack away, then drove holding the thumb out in front of his face, his knuckles against the windshield. It felt like a segment of a greasy tree branch, but he clung to it gratefully.

  Out of the silvery liquid glare of the cold sunlight, a big gold Honda motorcycle was cruising toward him in the oncoming lane; he couldn’t see the rider behind the gleaming windshield and fairing, but the passenger was a railthin old woman sitting up high against the sissy bar, her gray hair streaming behind, unconfined by any sort of helmet … and she was wearing a blue-and-white bandanna tied right over her eyes.

  Her head was swiveling around, tilted back as though she was trying to smell or hear something. Sullivan inched the thumb across the inside of the windshield to keep it blocking the line from her blindfolded face to his own.

  Sweat stung his eyes, and he forced himself not to tromp on the accelerator now; the Honda could outmaneuv
er him anywhere, even if he got out and ran. (The shadows of wheeling, shouting crows flickered over the lanes.) And it was probably only one of a number of vehicles trolling between Highland and Cahuenga right now.

  God, he prayed desperately as a tree and a parking lot trundled past outside his steamy window, let me get clear of this and I swear I’ll learn. I won’t blunder into predictable patterns again, trust me.

  The 101 Freeway was only a couple of big blocks ahead, and he ached for the breezy freedom of its wide gray lanes.

  Keening behind his clenched teeth, he pulled over to the Selma Avenue curb and put the engine into Park.

  He sprang out of the driver’s seat and scrambled into the back, tossing the mattress off the folded-out bed. Buddy would even now be telling them that Sullivan was in a brown Dodge van, but they’d recognize him even sooner if he didn’t have the full mask working. They would already have been given his name, his birth date, too much of what was himself. When he and Sukie had worked together they had been a good pair of mirror images, being twins, and so there had been no solid figure for a ghost or a tracker to focus on; but now he was alone, discrete, quantified, discontinuous. Identifiable.