Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

Bradshaw had followed him, and now swung open the outside door. Late-afternoon sunlight and the cold sea breeze swept into the room, and Elizalde and Kootie and Johanna shuffled blinking out of the smoky kitchen onto the office carpet.

  Sullivan twisted the cable clamps off the van battery’s terminals, and then began disconnecting the wires that linked the components of their makeshift device. “We’re off the air,” he remarked.

  “If I’m supposed to know where he is,” said Bradshaw, “then he must be at his grave in—the Hollywood Cemetery. I’ve been visiting the grave ever since he died—even after I died.”

  Nettled, Sullivan just nodded his head. “That’s fine. Hollywood Cemetery, I know where that is, on Santa Monica, right over the fence from Paramount Studios. Straight up the Harbor Freeway to the 101. I should easily be back before dark.” He would even have time to stop at Max Henry’s on Melrose for a shot or two of Wild Turkey and a couple of chilly Coorses, before going on, north a block, to—to the cemetery.

  It occurred to Sullivan that he had not been within the walls of that cemetery since the day of his father’s funeral, in 1959. “Uh,” he asked awkwardly, “where’s his … grave marker?”

  “North end of the lake—by Jayne Mansfield’s cenotaph—that means empty grave—she’s buried somewhere else.”

  “Okay. Now I wonder if I could borrow your—”

  “Explain to him,” interrupted Bradshaw, “that I couldn’t come along. Tell him I’m waiting here, and I—(gasp)—I’ve missed him.” He raised his hand as if fending off an argument. “And you can’t drive that van.”

  “No, I was just going to ask if—”

  “No,” Bradshaw insisted, “the van is out. It’s a … a disgrace. Take my car, it’s a Chevy Nova. Full tank of gas. It drives a little sideways—but that’ll help keep anyone from being able to see—which way you’re going.”

  “Great,” said Sullivan, wishing he had a beer in his hand right now. “That’s a good idea, thanks.” He squinted through the open doorway at Elizalde, who had walked out across the asphalt and was taking deep breaths of the fresh air. “Angelica,” he called, “can I have back the … machine in the fanny pack?”

  She gave him an opaque look—she probably couldn’t see him in the dim interior—and then she walked back and stepped up inside. “What is Commander Hold-’Em?” she asked quietly.

  “My sister’s slang for death, the Grim Reaper. Is it back in the apartment?”

  “You’ve named the gun that?”

  Psychiatrists! he thought. “No,” he said patiently. “I was talking about the gun, and then you asked a question about my sister’s term for death and I answered you, and then I was talking about the gun again. Which I still am. Could I have it?”

  “You showed me how to use it,” she said. Her brown eyes were still unreadable.

  “I remember. After you said you didn’t believe in them.” Suddenly he was sure that her patient, Frank, had killed himself with a gun.

  “Kootie would be safer here,” she said, “in this masked area, with Bradshaw or Shadroe or whoever your ‘godbrother’ is.”

  “I agree,” said Sullivan, who thought he could see where this was going. “And so would the famous Dr. Elizalde, whose face I saw on the network news, night before last.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said. “Don’t worry, I won’t intrude on you and your father.”

  Bradshaw started to speak, but Sullivan cut him off with the chopping gesture. “Why?” Sullivan asked her.

  “Because you should have a gun along with you when you go there,” Elizalde told him, “and I won’t let you go by yourself with a gun, because I think you’re still ‘looking Commander Hold-’Em in the eye.’ ” She was staring straight at him, and she raised her eyebrows now. “That is to say, I think you might kill yourself.”

  “No,” interjected Bradshaw worriedly, “I won’t take responsibility for the kid. I told you no kids.”

  “I won’t be any trouble, mister,” said Kootie, “just—”

  “That’s … hysterical,” Sullivan said to Elizalde. “Give me the goddamn gun.”

  “No.” Elizalde jumped out into the yard and sprinted across the asphalt; when she was ten yards away, she turned and shaded her face with her hand to look back at him. She lifted the hem of her untucked old sweatshirt, and he saw that she was wearing the fanny pack. “If you try to take it from me, I will shoot you in the leg.”

  His face hot, Sullivan stepped down out of the office. “With a .45? You may as well shoot me in the chest, Angelica!”

  Her hand was under the flapping hem of her sweatshirt. “All right. At least you won’t die a suicide, and go to Hell.”

  He stopped, and grinned tiredly at her. “Whaa? Is this a psychiatric thing or a Catholic thing?”

  “It’s me not wanting you dead, asshole! Why won’t you let me come along?”

  Sullivan had lost his indignity somehow, and he shrugged. “Come along, then. I hope you don’t mind if I stop for a drink on the way.”

  “Your sister drank, I gather?”

  His exhausted grin widened. “You want to make something out of it?”

  “I’ve got to make something out of something.”

  Bradshaw stepped down to the pavement behind Sullivan. “Take the kid!” he wheezed. “With you!” He seemed to be at a loss for words then. “On Long Beach sands,” he said finally. “I can connect nothing with nothing.”

  Sullivan turned around. “What’s the matter with you, Nicky? Kootie can stay in our apartment. He won’t be any trouble. He’ll probably just take a nap.”

  “Sure, mister,” said Kootie. “I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night anyway; I could use a nap. I won’t be any trouble, mister.”

  Bradshaw just shook his head. After a moment he shook himself and dug into the pocket of his ludicrous old shorts, and then tossed a ring of keys to Sullivan. “Gray Chevy Nova right behind you,” he said. “The blinkers don’t work right—the emergency flashers come on if you try to signal. Use hand signals, okay?”

  Sullivan frowned. “Okay. I guess we’ll for sure be back before dark.”

  Bradshaw nodded bleakly. “Leave a dollar in the ashtray for gas.”

  CHAPTER 40

  “It’s only the Red King snoring,” said Tweedledee.

  “Come and look at him!” the brothers cried, and they each took one of Alice’s hands, and led her up to where the King was sleeping.

  “Isn’t he a lovely sight?” said Tweedledum.

  Alice couldn’t say honestly that he was.

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass

  THE CEMETERY IN THE late afternoon was full of ghosts, and at first Sullivan and Elizalde tried to avoid them.

  Even before they parked Bradshaw’s goofy car, while they were still hardly past the office, they saw semitransparent figures clustered around the big white sculpture of a winged man sexually assaulting a woman. The smoky figures might have been attempting to stop the winged man, or help him subdue the woman, or just conceal the atrocity from the street.

  Sullivan swore softly and looked for a place to park. The broad lawns he remembered out front along Santa Monica Boulevard were gone, those spaces now stacked full of shops—a Mexican market and a Chinese restaurant shouldering right up to the east side of the ivied stone buildings of the cemetery entrance, muffler and bodywork shops to the west—but there was still a sense of isolation here inside, in this silent, far-stretching landscape of old sycamores and palms and canted gravestones. Looking through Bradshaw’s windshield at the ghosts that could hold their shapes in this still air, Sullivan wished the noise and smoke and spastic motion of the boulevard could intrude their vital agitations here.

  Elizalde had Houdini’s plaster right hand in her lap, and Sullivan was gripping the left one between his knees; the dried thumb was in his shirt pocket.

  Past the ghosts was a crossroads, and he turned left onto the narrow paved lane and parked. “Th
e lake’s ahead of us,” he said, hefting Houdini’s plaster hand. “Let’s walk up to it—the noise of the engine might spook him—” He winced at the unintended pun. “—and anyway, this car keeps looking like it’s in the process of running off onto the grass.”

  Actually, he simply didn’t want to get there. His father’s ghost was to meet him? Would it be a translucent figure like the ones climbing on the statue?

  I was only seven years old! he thought, with no conviction. It was thirty-three years ago! How can I—still—be to blame?

  Still, he was profoundly sorry that he had let Elizalde talk him out of the preliminary drinks, and remotely glad that she was holding the gun.

  “Okay.” Elizalde seemed subdued as she climbed out of the car, and the double slam of the doors rang hollowly in the quiet groves. “Do normal people see that crowd by the entrance?”

  “No,” said Sullivan. “They’re just visible to specimens like you and me.”

  Looking north, Sullivan could see the distant white letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign standing on the dark hills, and the words holy wood flickered through his mind. To the south across the stone-studded hillocky lawn, past the farthest palms, was the back wall of Paramount Studios, with the red Paramount logo visible on the water tower beyond the air-conditioning ducts.

  “It’s … somewhere ahead of us,” said Sullivan, starting forward. He glanced to his left, remembering that Carl Switzer was buried right there by the road somewhere. Switzer had been “Alfalfa” in the old Our Gang comedies, and had been shot to death in January of ’59. Alfalfa’s grave had been only five months old when Arthur Patrick Sullivan was buried, and the twins, big fans of the Our Gang shows, had found the still-bright marker while silently wandering around the grounds before their father’s graveside service. Neither of them had said anything as they had stared down at Switzer’s glassy-smooth stone marker. It had been obvious that anybody at all could die, at any time.

  “This is very pretty,” said Elizalde, scuffing along next to him and holding Houdini’s plaster right hand like a flashlight.

  “It’s morbid,” snapped Sullivan. “Burying a bunch of dead bodies, and putting a fancy marker over each one so the survivors will know where to go and cry. What if the markers got rearranged? You’d be weeping over some stranger. Not some stranger, even, some cast-off dead body of a stranger, like a pile of fingernail clippings or old shoes, or the dust from inside an electric razor. What’s the difference between coming out here to think about dead Uncle Irving, and thinking about him in your own living room? Okay, here you can sit on the grass and be only six feet above his inert old body. Would it be better if you could dig a hole, and sit only one foot above it?” He was shaking. “Everybody should be cremated, and the ashes should be tossed in the sea with no fanfare at all.”

  “It’s a sign of respect,” said Elizalde angrily. “And it’s a real, tangible link. Think of the Shroud of Turin! Where would we be if they had cremated Jesus?”

  “I don’t know—we’d have the Ashtray of Turin.”

  She swung Houdini’s plaster hand and hit Sullivan hard in the shoulder. One of the fingers flew off and bounced in the coarse green grass.

  Sullivan had let out a sharp Hah! at the impact, and he sidestepped onto the grass to keep his balance. “Goddammit,” he whispered, rubbing his shoulder as he stepped back down to the asphalt, keeping away from her, “give me back the fucking .45, will you? If you go trying to make some theatrical gesture with that, you’ll kill someone.” He noticed the gap in the hand, and looked around until he spotted the finger. “Oh, good work,” he said, stepping across and bending to pick it up. “It didn’t half cost my dead sister and I any trouble to get hold of these things, go ahead and bust ’em up, by all means.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “We can glue it. I’m tired, I didn’t mean it to be more than a tap. But you weren’t saying what you believed, just what you wished you believed—that dead people go away and stay away, canceled. Are these ghosts or not?”

  He thought her question was rhetorical until she repeated it in an urgent whisper. Then he stopped fiddling with the plaster finger and looked ahead.

  “Uh,” he said, “my guess is ghosts.”

  Three fat men in tuxedos were walking toward them, a hundred feet ahead, where the road was unpaved; the man in the middle had his arms around his companions’ shoulders, and they were all walking in step, but no dust at all was being kicked up, and their steps made no sounds in the still air. Their mouths gaped in wide, silent smiles.

  “Let’s slant south, toward Paramount,” said Sullivan.

  He and Elizalde set off diagonally across the grass to their right with a purposeful air.

  The sun was low over the mausoleum along the distant Gower Street border of the cemetery—the shadows of the palm trees stretched for dozens of yards across the gold-glowing grass.

  Griffith’s magic hour, Sullivan thought with a shiver.

  Flat markers stippled the low luminous hills in meandering ranks, like stepping-stones, and some graves were bordered with ankle-high sections of scalloped pink concrete, and the interior space of these was consistently filled with broken white stones; a few, the graves of little children, had plastic dinosaurs and toy cars and miniature soldiers set up on the stones to make pitiful dioramas.

  Mausoleums like ornate WPA powerhouse relay stations stood along the dirt road ahead of them, and the brassy sunlight shone on the wingless eagle atop the Harrison Gray Otis monument; Sullivan was sure that the eagle had had wings in 1959. The cypresses around them rustled in the gentle breeze and threw down dry leaves.

  Sullivan and Elizalde had by now wandered into a marshy area, back by the corrugated-aluminum walls and broken windows of the Paramount buildings, that seemed to be all babies’ graves, the markers sunken and blurred with silt.

  Houdini’s maimed hand was shaking in Elizalde’s fists. “We’ve passed those ghosts,” she whispered. “Let’s get to the lake.”

  At that moment a wailing laugh erupted from somewhere far off among the trees and gravestones behind them. Elizalde’s free hand was cold and tight in Sullivan’s.

  They hurried back to the dirt road, and over it, onto a descending slope of shadowed grass. Ahead of them was a long lake, with stone stairs at the north end and, at the south end, tall white pillars and a marble pedestal rising out of the dark water. A white sarcophagus lay on the pedestal.

  “Douglas Fairbanks, Senior,” panted Sullivan as he and Elizalde hurried along the marge of the narrow lake.

  Human shapes made out of dried leaves were dancing silently in the shadows of the stairs, and curled sections of dry palm fronds swam and bobbed their fibrous necks out on the dark face of the water.

  “Just up the hill and across the next road,” Sullivan said, “is the other lake, the one my father—”

  He couldn’t finish the sentence, and just pulled her along.

  Nicholas Bradshaw had been standing for several minutes, watching Kootie breathe in his sleep as he lay curled on the wooden floor, before he crouched and shook the boy’s shoulder.

  The boy’s eyes opened, but Bradshaw was sure that the alert, cautious intelligence in the gaze was Thomas Edison’s.

  “A car went by twice,” said Bradshaw, “slow. I don’t think it was bad guys—but it did make me think you’d be—safer back in the, office.”

  Kootie got lithely to his feet and glanced at the blinds, which glowed orange around the slats. “They’re not back yet.”

  “No,” said Bradshaw. The empty living room echoed hollowly, and he didn’t like to talk in here.

  “The boy’s asleep,” said Kootie. “I suppose I can be out in the air for a few minutes—your place does seem to be a deceptive one for trackers to focus on.”

  “I’ve tried to make it so,” said Bradshaw, opening the door. “And it helps that I’m a dead man.”

  “I reckon,” said Kootie, following him outside.

  Parrots fluttered past ov
erhead, shouting raucously, and the mockingbirds on the telephone lines had learned the two-note chirrup that car alarms emitted when they were activated by the key-ring remotes, and which always sounded to Bradshaw like the first two notes of the “Colonel Bogie March.”

  Bradshaw was remembering the early days of working on “Ghost of a Chance,” in ’55 and ’56. CBS had filmed the show’s episodes on a couple of boxy sets on a soundstage at General Service Studios, and in spite of the depth-and-texture look that Ozzie Nelson had pioneered for “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” the director at General Service had held to the old flat look of early television—bright lighting with minimal shadow and background.

  During the show’s tightly scheduled first two years, Nicky Bradshaw had seemed to spend most of his waking hours on those sets, and it had been a deepening and expanding of his whole world when CBS had given the job of filming the show to Stage 5 Productions in 1957. The Stage 5 director had used a series of sets that had been built for Hitchcock’s “The Trouble with Harry,” and often filmed scenes at local parks, and occasionally at the beach.

  His world had gone flat again when the show was finally canceled in 1960, a year after his godfather’s death. (He hurried Kootie toward the office—he must do this thing before his godfather’s ghost arrived.) And then it had flattened to the equivalent of sketchy animation in a flip-book after his own death in 1975.

  Most of all—more than sex, more than food—he missed dreams. He had not allowed himself to sleep at all in the last seventeen years, for if he were to have a frightening dream while he wasn’t consciously monitoring the workings of his dead body, he wouldn’t be able to wake himself up—and the inescapable trauma would surely be strong enough to cause him to throw ghost-shells in his fright … and, since he had continued occupying his body past the end of his lifeline, the ghosts would have no charged line to arc back to.

  They would collide, collapse into jarring interference, implode in fearful spiraling feedback.

  He knew of several cases in which a person had suffered a profound trauma only a few moments after unacknowledged death, and had burst into flames. Bradshaw had accumulated seventeen years.