Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  “Don’t worry, Nicky,” said Sullivan, “we’ll use a scrambler. Angelica, could I have Houdini’s thumb?” When she had dug the thing out of her shoe and passed it to him, he laid it on the table beside the telephone. “We can dial with this.”

  “It would be good if we could make a test call first,” Kootie said thoughtfully. “Anybody got any dead people they got to get a message to?”

  Visibly tensing before she moved, Elizalde stepped forward away from the stove, placing her sneakers carefully among the looped wires, and sat down in the chair. “There’s a guy I took money from,” she said steadily, “and I didn’t do the work he paid for.”

  Kootie hopped down from the counter. “You know his number?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’ll need a lure,” he said, “remember? A ‘homing beacon.’ ”

  She leaned sideways to pull her wallet out of her hip pocket, and then she dug a tattered, folded note out of it. “This is in his handwriting,” she said. “His emotional handwriting.” She looked over at Johanna by the stove. “Could you light the candles and … smear the oil over the door lintel, or whatever’s required?”

  “Better than you, maybe,” said Johanna with a merry smile.

  Elizalde looked at Sullivan. “Drop the dime.”

  He was grateful to her for going first. “Okay. Kootie, turn up that fire.”

  Sullivan stepped past Bradshaw into the dark office, and while Johanna struck matches to the candles on the shelves and shook out the oil and muttered rhymes under her breath, he dug out of his pocket the magnet they had pulled from the old telephone. He crouched beside the upright Langmuir gauge and waved the magnet past the tiny iron armature, and heard the faint contained ting as it rocked against the dangling quartz filament. Then he opened the outside door, sprinted out through the glaring sunlight to the covered van and set the magnet down on the asphalt beside it.

  Seven seconds later he was back in the kitchen, panting in the hot fumes of cinnamon and mint.

  Kootie had connected the modified pencil sharpener, and the speaker was resonating with a flat sound like a sustained exhalation; the mint in the saucepan was steaming and sputtering.

  Elizalde took the receiver off the hook, then picked up Houdini’s thumb and began dialing the telephone; somehow the speaker behind her made a fluttering sound in synchronization with the rattle of the dial. Belatedly Sullivan realized that privacy would not be possible here, and he took a hasty sip of the beer to cool his heated face.

  Elizalde was still dialing numbers into the telephone, but already a whispering voice was rasping out of the speaker.

  “Cosa mala nunca muere,” it said. “Me entiendes, Mendez?”

  Sullivan felt moving air on his sweaty scalp at the back of his head, and he realized that his hair was actually standing on end.

  “It’s the damned crowd effect,” said Kootie irritably, “that can’t be your man yet.” He frowned at Elizalde. “Do you recognize this voice?” Then Kootie’s eyes were wide, and he spoke with a scared boy’s intonation: “It’s that laughing bag!”

  Elizalde’s hand sprang away from the dial, and Houdini’s thumb landed in the sink. “Jesus, he’s right,” she said. “The cloth bag in the truck bed!”

  Sullivan didn’t know what they were talking about. “What did it just say?”

  “It said, a—a bad thing never dies,” said Elizalde rapidly, hugging herself, “and then it said, ‘You understand?’ ” She threw Sullivan a frightened look. “Can’t I quit this and just go away?”

  He spread his hands. “Can’t I?” he asked, really hoping that she would find some way to say yes.

  But she was rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands; and then she said, “Could you bring that thumb back here?”

  As Sullivan stepped over to the sink, Bradshaw growled, “Is this somebody you two (gasp) tracked in on your shoes?” The mint leaves in the pot on the fire were smoking and popping now.

  Kootie shrugged. “It’s … yes, something, somebody, that was paying attention to me this morning, and it would have seen Mrs. Elizalde.”

  “Miss,” said Elizalde.

  “Let a dead guy clear the line for you,” Shadroe said. He stumped into the kitchen—carelessly stepping all over the wires, his bare belly swinging ahead of him—and he took the receiver and blew sharply into the mouthpiece. “Hello?” he said. “Hello?” Then he dialed Operator, twice.

  He set the receiver back down beside the telephone. “Try it now.”

  Sullivan had fetched the thumb, and handed it to her, and she began shakily dialing again. It took nearly a full minute for her to dial all the numbers of her man’s birth date and full name, but Bradshaw’s breath had apparently chased away any stray ghosts.

  At last she was finished dialing, and she hesitantly picked up the receiver.

  A musical buzz sounded from the speaker by the sink; it stopped, and then began again, stopped, and began again.

  “My God,” said Sullivan softly. “It’s ringing!”

  “Cultural conditioning,” muttered Kootie. “It’s what everybody expects, even the man she’s calling.”

  “Who is that?” came a startled voice from the speaker, and Sullivan was peripherally impressed with the fidelity of Edison’s chalk speaker.

  “Frank?” said Elizalde into the mouthpiece. “It’s me, it’s Angelica.”

  “Angelica!” The initial surprise in the voice gave way to petulance: “Angelica, where are you? Who is this old man?”

  Sullivan saw Elizalde glance bewilderedly from Bradshaw to Kootie. “Who do you mean, Frank?”

  “He comes in your clinic every day! He does the séances all wrong, reading palms of people’s hands, and … taking liberties with the pretty women!”

  “Oh, that would be—that’s not my clinic anymore, Frank, I don’t—”

  “I saw you today, from here, from the window. You fell on the curb when I saw you coming. I live here, and I waved, but you didn’t come in.”

  “I’m sorry, Frank, I—”

  “You didn’t come in—you don’t respect me anymore—you never did respect me! I didn’t speak to you in the sewer, and I shouldn’t speak to you now. You didn’t come visit me after I hurt myself in your clinic. You have other boyfriends now, in your fine house, and you’ve never once thought of me.”

  Elizalde’s face was contorted, but her voice was strong. “Frank,” she said, “I failed you. I’m sorry. Do you remember why you came to my clinic, why you were sent there?”

  “Uh … well, because I always had to keep checking over and over again if my shoes were tied and if I locked doors and turned off the headlights on my car, even in the daytime—and I went to bed and didn’t come out for a month—and I tried to kill myself. And then after I got out of the hospital they said I should be your outpatient.”

  “I failed to help you, and I’m terribly sorry. I haven’t had any boyfriends. I’ve been hiding, running. And every day I’ve been thinking about what I did to you, how I let you down, and wishing I could go back and make it right.”

  “You can make it right—right now! We can get married, like I said in my note—”

  The mint had flared up in the pan. Sullivan took the pan off the fire and clanged the lid onto it for a moment to snuff the flames.

  “No, Frank,” said Elizalde. “You’re dead now. I think you know that, don’t you? Things like marriage are behind you now. You didn’t hurt yourself in my clinic that night, you killed yourself. You remember when you went to bed and stayed there for a month—you weren’t supposed to relax yet, then, it wasn’t time for that yet. It’s time now. You’re dead. Go to sleep, and sleep so deeply that … there won’t be room or light for any dreams.”

  For several long seconds the kitchen was silent except for the background hissing of the speaker, and Sullivan saw Kootie glance speculatively at the spinning chalk cylinder.

  Then the voice came back. “I’ve thought I might be dead,” it said qui
etly. “Are you sure, Angelica?”

  “I am sure. I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve thought about me? Been sorry?”

  “You’ve been behind all the thoughts I’ve had. I came back here to ask you to forgive me.”

  “Ah.” Again there was silence for a few seconds. “Goodbye, Angelica. Vaya con Dios.”

  “Do you forgive me?”

  The hissing went on for a full minute before Bradshaw shifted his weight on his feet and cleared his throat; and finally the speaker began making a dull rattle, which ceased when Elizalde reached out and pressed the hang-up button on the telephone cradle.

  Sullivan tipped up his can of beer to avoid having to meet anyone’s eye, and he could hear Bradshaw’s knees creak as he shifted his weight again. The mint smoke was billowing thickly under the low ceiling.

  Elizalde pushed back the chair and stood up. “I fucking don’t—” she began in a choking voice—

  And the musical buzz started up from the speaker by the sink; it stopped, and then started again.

  She bent to snatch up the receiver again. “Hello?”

  From the chalk-and-pencil-sharpener speaker behind her a cultured man’s voice said, “Could I speak to Don Tay, please?”

  “That’s for me,” said Kootie, stepping forward and sitting down in the chair. Elizalde mutely handed him the receiver. He cleared his throat. “This is Thomas Edison,” he said.

  The voice on the speaker exhaled sharply. “For God’s sake, this is an open line! Use elementary caution, will you? My son—”

  “—Is safe,” said Kootie. His face was composed, but tears had begun to run down his cheeks. “We’ve got the line masked and deviled on this end.”

  “God, and you’re speaking physically! With his voice! What—in hell—did we do?” Louder now, the voice called, “Kootie! Can you hear me, boy?”

  Kootie’s reddening face relaxed into a grimace and he burst into tears. “I’m here, Dad, but don’t yell or—or the speaker might break, we’ve got it hooked up to a pencil sharpener. Mr. Edison is taking good care of me, don’t worry. But Dad! Tell Mom I didn’t mean to do it! I’m the one that should be dead! I tried to tell you before, but you were b-both d-d-drunk!” His head was down and his stiff poise was gone, and he was just sobbing.

  Elizalde got on her knees beside him and put her arm around his bare narrow shoulders and rocked him gently.

  “Boy, boy,” said the voice on the speaker shakily, “we’re fragmented here, we blur and break, and some of the pieces you talk to may be minimal. Your mother has gone on ahead, and perhaps has … found the white light, who knows? She told me to make you understand that she loves you, and I love you, and you were …”—the voice was still loud, but blurring—“mot to vlame for what haphened. Ee-bay areful-kay. Isten-lay oo-tay Om-Tay …”

  Gradually the hissing background had been becoming textured with clinking and mumbling, and Sullivan thought he heard a voice in the middle distance say, Te explico, Federico?

  “I love you!—Dad?” said Kootie loudly into the receiver; then he fumbled at the telephone until he had found and pushed the disconnect button. The speaker clicked and resonated hollowly, and faintly a woman’s voice said, “If you would like to make a call, please hang up and dial again.”

  Elizalde helped Kootie out of the chair, and to Sullivan she seemed to be hurrying the weeping boy, clearing the way so that he could finally call his father. She’s a psychiatrist, Sullivan thought. She probably figures this is all good therapy, all this awful idiot pathos.

  As he sat down on the warmed chair seat he noticed that Edison was letting Kootie cry, not taking over the boy’s body again. Sullivan frowned—he knew the fused quartz filament would hold its initial vibration for quite a while in the rarefied mercury-vapor atmosphere inside the gauge, but it had to be picking up noise, random interference, to judge by the way the crowd effect kept creeping in.

  But there was nothing Edison would have been able to do about it. At least the speaker was giving out only an even hiss right now.

  Sullivan held out his open palm like a surgeon in the middle of an operation. “Thumb?”

  Over Kootie’s shaking shoulder, Elizalde gave him a glance of exhausted pique. “Thumb,” she said, slapping Houdini’s black thumb into his hand.

  Sullivan began dialing. Hide, hide, he thought, the cow’s outside? Or, Dad, I’m sorry I wasn’t out there treading water beside you, even if it would just have been to drown with you. Or simply, Dad, where have you been? What on earth am I supposed to do now?

  He dialed the last numbers of SULLIVAN and laid the thumb down.

  The speaker beside the sink buzzed as the woman’s voice came back on the line. “What number were you trying to reach?”

  Her tone was palpably sarcastic now—and with a sudden emptiness in his chest he realized that, for the second time in four days, he was talking on the telephone to his twin sister, Sukie.

  Impulsively he replied in a falsetto imitation of Judy Garland: “Oh, Auntie Em, I’m frightened!”

  And Sukie came back quickly enough to override his last couple of syllables with “Auntie Em! Auntie Em!” in the sneering tones of the Wicked Witch of the West.

  Sullivan sneaked a glance to the side. Everyone in the smoky kitchen, including fat Johanna in the office doorway, was staring at him; even Kootie had stopped crying in order to gape.

  “He put her in a Leyden jar,” Sukie went on in a singsong voice, “and there he kept her near yet far.”

  What? thought Sullivan bewilderedly. Put who in a Leyden jar? Auntie Em, in that crystal ball in the movie? A Leyden jar was an early kind of capacitor for storing a static electric charge. “What the hell, Sukie?” he said.

  “This root beer will not pass away, Pete. Have you drained it yet?”

  “—Yes.” The blood was thudding in his ears, and he felt as though he were standing behind his own body, leaning over its defeat-slumped shoulder. “At least you swam out.”

  “We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. You should have drank more.

  “ ‘We are but older children, dear, Who fret to find our bedtime near.’ ”

  “That’s from Alice,” said Sullivan.

  “Through the Looking-Glass, actually,” Sukie said.

  “Why do—you all—quote those books so much?”

  “They’re not nonsense here, Pete. The little girl who falls down the deep well that’s lined with bookshelves and pictures—call it ‘your whole life flashing before your eyes’—the collapse of all the events of your timeline, down to an idiot unlocated point that occupies no space—the Alice books are an auto-mortography. And then you’re in a place where your … ‘physical size’ is a wildly irrational variable, and distance and speed are problematical. And you can’t help but go among mad people.”

  The volume was perceptibly diminishing; the vibrations of the quartz filament in the Langmuir gauge in the other room were becoming increasingly randomized.

  “I—” said Sullivan, “wanted to talk to Dad, actually …”

  “He doesn’t want to talk to you, actually. You’re just going to have to be a little soldier about this. Lewis Carroll wasn’t dead, but he knew a little girl who did die—he had taken photographs of her, and he caught her ghost in a Leyden jar, just like Ben Franklin used to do. She told Lewis Carroll all those stories, and he wrote ’em down.” She paused then, and when she spoke again her voice was gentler. “You’re probably looking Commander Hold-’Em in the eye right now, aren’t you?”

  Sullivan was. (He felt even further removed from his seated body than he had a few minutes ago, and he knew that, if Elizalde refused to give him back the .45, he could easily find something else—hell, he could walk in two minutes from here to the ocean, and just swim out.) His father had not forgotten nor forgiven. Over the reeks of burnt mint and Bradshaw’s cinnamon-and-rot breath and his own beery sour sweat, Sullivan could smell Coppertone lotion and mayonnaise and the terrible sea.<
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  “If you care,” he whispered.

  “I’ve got to take a moment to say … good. But! It’s just that he doesn’t want to talk to anyone over this open line, Pete. He wants you to go pick him up. He says Nicky Bradshaw will know where he is, he has apparently dreamed about Nicky. Dream a little dream of me … not.” Her voice was definitely fading now.

  “Beth,” he said loudly, “I ran away from you too, can you—”

  At the same time she was saying, “I worked hard to ruin your whole life, Pete, can you—”

  With their old skill of each knowing what the other was about to say, they paused—Sullivan smiled, and he thought that Sukie was smiling somewhere too—and then they said, in perfect unison, “Forgive me?”

  After a pause, “How could I possibly not?” they both said.

  Sukie’s voice faded away into the increasing hiss of the speaker; for a few seconds everyone in the kitchen heard a dog barking somewhere deep in the amplified abyss, and then the roaring hiss was all there was.

  For some reason Kootie whispered “Fred?” and began crying again.

  Sullivan hung up the telephone. He lifted his head and looked at Bradshaw’s impassive, squinting face. “I need to go pick up my father,” he said hoarsely. “Apparently you know where he would be.”

  “Turn off your telephone,” whined Bradshaw aggressively. “Every psychic from San Fran to San Clam is probably picking all this up.”

  Sullivan stood up and pushed the sweaty hair back from his forehead. “True. Hell, it’s probably been breaking in on TV sets and radios,” he said, “like CB transmissions.” He walked stiffly into the dark office and crouched to unplug the transformer from the wall socket. The air in here was sharp with the oily, metallic, but somehow also organic-smelling reek of ozone.