Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

  He pushed Elizalde back and braced his feet. Now his hands thrust up past his head, scraping his elbows against the claustrophobically close metal walls, and pressed strongly upward against the metal lid—and twisted. The forceful torque released a catch, and then he was turning the whole lid and the upper edge of the cylinder, bracing his feet against the floor. He straightened his legs, and he was lifting the lid off of them, pushing it up with his hands, which were out in rushing cold air to the wrists—and only then did Sullivan realize that he and Elizalde had been upright rather than lying horizontally.

  And then up abruptly became down, and both of them were falling headfirst out of the narrow can while air bubbles clunked and rattled past them; Sullivan’s shoulders jammed in the narrower neck for a moment, but the water and a lot of loose metal disks coursing past him pushed him free—

  And he fell through sunlit air and splashed heavily into shallow water, twisting his neck and shoulder against a muddy bottom and catching Elizalde’s knee hard in the small of his back.

  When he struggled up to a sitting position the water was rocking around his chest and his eyes were blinking in the golden light of late afternoon. He was leaning back against vertical stone, wheezing and panting, and through the sopping tangles of his hair he could see two branching tree trunks standing up from the shadowed brown water a couple of yards away from where he sat, and, a couple of yards beyond them, a low cement coping and a hedge; a few of the top leaves shone golden green in the last rays of sunlight.

  His hands were spasmodically clawing in the silty mud under him, trying to find a tree root to grip in case the world was going to turn upside down again.

  Elizalde sat up in the water beside him and held on to his shoulder while she coughed out muddy water and whoopingly sucked air into her lungs. Her mud-matted hair was long again, and the lean, tired face was her own. When he could see that she would be able to breathe, Sullivan cautiously leaned his head back and looked up. He was sitting against a square marble pillar that supported a marble crosspiece far overhead. He and Elizalde were apparently in the south corner of the lake, in the tail-end lagoon behind the marble walls of the Douglas Fairbanks monument.

  The world was holding still, and he began to relax, muscle by muscle.

  There was a twisting itch in his ear then, and he nearly thrust his finger into it; but the buzzing voice said, “You’ve got to get to the Paramount wall—but first grope around in the water and get Houdini’s hands.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  Sullivan pushed away from the pillar and slowly waded on his knees out across the pool, his face bent so closely over the water that his harsh breaths blew rings onto the surface, and he swept his hands through the velvety silt. Elizalde was just breathing hoarsely and watching him.

  Faintly he could hear a rapid creak of metal and quacking laughter, but the sounds were distant and not drawing closer.

  The silt was thick with pennies and nickels and dimes, but he tossed them aside—Elizalde inhaled sharply when she saw the first handful of them—and at last he found the plaster hand with the missing finger and silently handed it to her, and then a few moments later he found the other.

  “Up this far slope to the service road,” he whispered to Elizalde, “and then turn right and hug the wall all the way back west. The car is—”

  “You were in there, with me,” interrupted Elizalde tensely, “right? The can was full of salt water this time, wasn’t it?”

  Sullivan sucked the elastic cuff of his leather jacket; and he thought that it still tasted of salt. “I don’t know if it really happened or not,” he said, “but I was in there with you.”

  In Sullivan’s ear the voice resonated again: “At the end there, that was Houdini’s famous escape from the padlocked milk can. Big news in the teens and twenties.”

  Sullivan helped Elizalde stand up in the yielding mud, and then he waded to the coping, stepped up onto it, and threw one leg over the hedge. “My dad says that was Houdini’s famous escape from the milk can,” he said quietly.

  “This time it was ours,” Elizalde said, reaching up from the water for Sullivan to give her a boost. “Happy birthday.”

  Nicholas Bradshaw had shambled slowly out across the shadow-streaked parking lot to Pete Sullivan’s shrouded van, and by the back bumper he crouched to pick up the little magnet they’d taken out of the telephone. Before turning his steps toward one of the garages, he put the magnet in his mouth.

  I wonder, he thought stolidly, if you’re held entirely accountable for sins you commit after you’re dead. Kids before the age of reason aren’t considered capable of knowing right from wrong, so if a five-year-old kills a playmate, he’s not blamed. Or not much. He’s just a little kid, after all. So what about adults past the age of … expiration? We’re just dead guys, after all.

  He thought of the “beasties,” the solid ghosts who wandered up from the beach in the evenings and hung around outside his office door, waiting for Bradshaw to set out paper plates with smooth pebbles on them. The poor old creatures could be vindictive—they sometimes pulled license plates off parked cars, and once or twice had got into incomprehensible squabbles among themselves and left broken-off fingers and noses to be swept up in the morning along with the usual litter of rocks and beer cans—but it would be folly to assign blame to them. “Wicked” was too concrete an adjective to be supported by the frail nouns that they were.

  He tugged open the creaking garage door, and dug out a folded tarpaulin and a big paint tray from behind the dusty frame of a ’55 Chevy. He carried them outside and pulled the door back down.

  When he had lugged everything across the lot and up into the office, Kootie was still snoring heavily in the Naugahyde chair by the desk.

  Bradshaw dropped his burdens and stumped into the kitchen and shook a steak knife free of the litter in one of the cabinet drawers.

  He would work without thinking—he would spread the tarpaulin out across the rug and lay the paint tray in the middle of it; then he would lift Kootie out of the chair …

  But he himself was not one of those mindless solid ghosts. He couldn’t honestly take refuge in that shabby category. He was dead (through no fault of his own), but his soul had not ever vacated his body.

  His face was cool, and when he brushed his hand across his forever-unstubbled jowls, it came away wet. Tears or sweat, it was Eat-’Em-&-Weep juice either way.

  Bradshaw would, he was determined that he would, simply lean over the boy’s face and, with the telephone magnet between his teeth, inhale the boy’s dying breath.

  Bradshaw would thus get Edison. And Edison could monitor Bradshaw’s body during the long nights aboard the boat, so that Bradshaw himself could sleep, and dream—just as Kootie had been able to sleep while the old ghost walked and spoke and looked out for him.

  I’ve never eaten a ghost, Bradshaw thought; well, why would I, none of the average run of ghosts could responsibly watch the store while I slept. But Thomas Edison could.

  Thomas Edison is probably the only ghost that I’d do this to get, he thought, and certainly the only very powerful one I’ll ever get a shot at; the only one that could let me safely dream. I wouldn’t… sell my soul, ever, except for this. It’s God’s fault, really, for putting this within my reach.

  He remembered the boy saying, I won’t be any trouble, mister.

  Bradshaw stood over the snoring boy, staring at the pulse under his ear; and then he looked down at his right hand, which was gripping the steak knife.

  For the first time since his death in 1975, his hand was trembling.

  Hunching along through the shadows under Paramount Studios’ corrugated aluminum back wall that was streaked with rust stains and gap-toothed with broken windows, Sullivan thought of the broad sunny lanes and parking lots and white monolithic soundstages on the other side. When he had last been on the Paramount lot, in about 1980, there had even been a dirt-paved street of Old West buildings under a vast open-air mural of a
blue sky.

  “We made a hundred and four pictures there in 1915,” said his father’s tiny voice in his ear, “back when it was Lasky, DeMille, and Goldfish in charge, and we’d moved everything here from the barn at Vine and Selma. Sixteen frames a second, the old Lumiere standard. Now because of sound reproduction it’s twenty-four frames a second, ninety feet a minute, and nobody needs to know how to read in order to see a movie, and the purity of the silent silver faces is gone. For us, the graveyard extends all the way south to Melrose.”

  Sullivan glanced back through the trees toward the Douglas Fairbanks lake. “Keep your voice down, Dad.”

  “Keep your voice down,” whispered Elizalde, who of course couldn’t hear what his father was saying.

  Gravestones stood in thickly clustered ranks outside the Beth Olam Mausoleum, and Sullivan felt as though he and Elizalde and his father were hiding behind a crowd. The shadowy human-shaped figures that stood among the stones seemed to be facing away almost vigilantly, as though guarding Arthur Patrick Sullivan’s retreat, and the multitudinous bass humming was louder.

  “You got a lot of friends here, Dad?” Pete Sullivan whispered.

  “Oh, sure,” said the voice in his ear. “Go up to the doors there, and rap shave-and-a-haircut.”

  “Just a sec,” Sullivan told Elizalde, and then he sprinted up the steps to the locked door of the mausoleum and rapped on the glass: knock, knock, knock-knock, knock

  From inside came the answering knock, knock.

  Elizalde was smiling and shaking her head as he rejoined her and they began walking north along the broad straight lane; receding perspective made the curbs seem to converge in the distance, and on the blue hills above the implicit intersection point stood once again the familiar white letters of the HOLLYWOOD sign. Why, Sullivan thought, can’t I get away from it?

  “It’s a gravestone, too,” said Sullivan’s father.

  For a minute they trudged along in silence through the gathering twilight. A couple of cars were parked ahead, and real people were opening the doors and climbing in; Sullivan no longer felt that he and Elizalde were conspicuous intruders.

  As they walked up to Bradshaw’s car Sullivan thought he heard laughter in the remote distance, but there was no triumph anymore in the cawing; and, from some radio or tape player a bit closer, he heard the opening notes of Al Jolson’s “California Here I Come.”

  I been away from you a long time … Sullivan thought.

  They climbed in and closed the doors gently. Sullivan started the engine, and as they drove out onto Santa Monica Boulevard and turned right, making oncoming cars swerve because of the way the Nova’s skewed front end seemed to be about to cross the divider line, Sullivan said, impulsively, “Dad, I don’t know if you knew it or not, but I didn’t swim out, to help you.”

  Elizalde was looking out the window at the Chinese restaurant they were passing.

  “I knew it,” buzzed the gnat in his ear. “And we both know it wouldn’t have done any good if you had swum out, and we both know that isn’t an excuse you’ll look at.”

  Sullivan hiked up a pack of Marlboros from the side pocket of his jacket and bit one cigarette out of it. “Did Sukie—Elizabeth—tell you that Kelley Keith is gunning for you?”

  “I knew she’d be waiting for me. So I came ashore hidden inside a sea monster. Grounded and damped to a flat magnetic line.”

  Sullivan pushed in the cigarette-lighter knob. “What … brings you to town?” he asked, unable to keep the defensive flippancy out of his tone. He didn’t look at Elizalde.

  “Why, I got a free ticket to the coast,” droned the gnat’s voice, possibly trying to imitate Sullivan’s tone, “and I thought I’d look you kids up.” The voice was silent, then said, “A big one was switched on here, and all of us were sympathetically excited by it. I came out of the ocean, after God knows how long; to find that the broken stragglers of Elizabeth had joined me, and that you had never—” The voice lapsed again.

  “Had never what, Dad?” Sullivan asked softly, looking almost across Elizalde to see where he was going through the windshield. “Stopped running? Away from the surf, that would be, Angelica.” His smile was stiff. “I didn’t want to look back, that’s for sure. I said to Dawn: Be sudden—to Dusk: Be soon,’ remember that, Dad? Francis Thompson poem. I’ve always tried to … what, to have nothing permanent, leave nothing behind that would, like, hang around. I always hated things to be … etched in stone.”

  “Uh,” said Elizalde hesitantly, “I think the car’s on fire.”

  Smoke was trickling, then billowing, from the slots on the top of the dashboard. “Shit,” said Sullivan—he snatched the cigarette lighter out of its slot, and blinked for a moment at the flaming, gummy wad on the end of it; then he gripped the wheel with his free fingers while he cranked down the driver’s-side window with his left hand, and he pitched the burning thing out onto the street. “That was the cigarette lighter, wasn’t it?” he asked angrily.

  Elizalde bent over to look at the still-smoking ring in the dashboard. “Yes,” she said. “No—it’s a cigar lighter. Wait a minute—altogether it says, L.A. CIGAR—TOO TRAGICAL. What the hell does that mean?”

  Sullivan waved caramel-reeking smoke away from his face, and he was remembering the tin ashtray that had briefly burst into flame at Los Tres Jesuses on Wednesday morning. “Let’s remember to ask Nicky.”

  “Freeway coming up,” said Elizalde.

  And so, thought Nicholas Bradshaw as he tucked the still-clean knife back in the kitchen drawer, I don’t get the renewal, I don’t get a rebirth. I have heard the candy-colored clowns they call the sandmen singing each to each—I do not think that they will sing to me.

  Cinnamon tears were still running down his slack cheeks, and his hands were still trembling, but, when he had plodded back into the office, he crouched and picked up Kootie’s limp, breathing body and straightened up again with no sense of effort. He even stood on his bad right ankle long enough to hook the outside door open with the left, and felt no twinge of pain.

  Shutting down, he thought.

  The boy whined in his sleep as the chilly evening air ruffled his sweat-damp hair. Every step Bradshaw took across the shadowed asphalt seemed to be the snap of a television being turned off, the slam of a door in an emptied building, the thump of a yellowed copy of Spooked being tossed out of a vacated apartment onto a ruptured vinyl beanbag chair in an alley. I am unmaking myself, he thought. I am looking at a menu and pointing past the flowing script on the vellum page, past the margin and the deckle edge, right off the cover of the menu, at, finally, the crushed cigarette butts in the ashtray.

  “I believe I feel like Death Warmed Over this evening,” he said out loud.

  Aside from a remote sadness that was almost nostalgia, he had no feelings about his decision not to kill Kootie and inhale the Edison ghost: not guilt at having considered doing it, nor satisfaction at having decided not to. He had held the knife beside the boy’s ear for several minutes, knowing that he could hide the body in one of the several freezers in the garages, and that Pete Sullivan and the Angelica woman would believe him when he told them that the boy must have run away; knowing too that he would be able thereafter to sleep again, and dream.

  Had it been the thought of the sort of dreams he might have had, that had made him finally pull back the knife? He didn’t think so. Even if the dreams had proved to be uniformly horrible—of the day he learned of his stepfather’s death, for example, or the summer-of-’75 week he had spent drunk and freshly dead inside the refrigerator on the Alaskan trawler in the Downtown Long Beach Marina, or whatever detail-memories the murdering of Kootie would have given him—he still thought he could have lived with them.

  In the end he just hadn’t been able to justify extending the mile-markers of his personal highway by reducing this living boy to one of them.

  At the apartment door now, he set the boy upright against the wall, and held him in place with one hand while he op
ened the door with the other. Then he got his arms under the boy’s arms and knees again and carried him inside.

  Bradshaw knelt to lay Kootie on the floor where he had been napping earlier. The boy began snoring, and Bradshaw got to his feet and left the apartment, being sure that the door was locked behind him.

  Back in his office he sat down on the couch without bothering to turn on any lights. The desk was bare—the components of the telephone had been disassembled and laid in a cardboard box, and Bradshaw had not brought the television set back in. His charred pigs, relieved of their malignant batteries, lay in a heap in the corner. Distantly he wondered if he would ever again marshal his warning systems.

  He reached around behind the arm of the couch and pulled free the broom, then clutched the straw end and boomed the top of the stick twice against the ceiling.

  Tomorrow, he thought, I’d like to drive to the Hollywood Cemetery myself, and lie down on one of those green slopes and just sleep. But I’ve been dead for seventeen years—God knows how bad it might be. The explosion might knock half the mausoleums off their foundations.

  He heard Johanna’s door slam upstairs, and then in the quiet night he could hear the faint ringing of the metal stairs. There was silence when she had got down to the asphalt, and then came a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” he said. “It’s not locked.”

  Johanna pushed the door open and stepped inside. “Not by accident?” she said in a concerned voice. “Always you lock it. And won’t you get your pigs and TV back up?”

  “I don’t think, so,” he said. “Sweetie-pie.” He inhaled, and then made words of the sigh: “Bring me a can of snuff, would you please? (Gasp) And then sit here by me.”

  The couch shifted when she sat down. “And no lights,” she said.

  “No.” He took the snuff can from her extended hand and twisted the lid. “Tomorrow is Halloween,” he said. “All these things we’ve had up through this night—will be broken up and lost. Like a rung bell finally stopping ringing—but. When dawn comes. Find it a sweet day, Johanna. Find it a blessed day. Live in the living world. While it lasts for you. I hope it may see you happy, and not hungry. Not hurt, not crying. Every one of me will be watching over you. To help, with all of whatever I’m worth then.”