Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  In the ’60s the sigil had been dug up from the landslide ruins by some motorcycle gang, and taken away; but when it had still been down in the ruins here, in the ’30s, blind Wystan had reportedly climbed down the new cliff to the broken streets one night—daylight meaning nothing to him by that point—and had then swum out to sea, and drowned himself.

  And according to a couple of very old men who spent afternoons playing chess in Point Fermin Park, the story they had heard when growing up was that a symbol etched into a particular cement slab down in the ruins had been cut by Wystan himself, with a hammer and chisel, just before he embarked on his fatal swim. They had described the slab, but they couldn’t recall what the symbol had been—“A cross, I think,” said one—and neither of them had ventured down into “that damned Atlantis” in decades.

  Fakhouri hadn’t wanted to climb down there either, and had asked Santiago to do it. He had given the boy a notepad and pencil with which to copy the symbol Wystan had chiseled into the slab, if he could find it.

  Santiago now began trudging along the rim of the collapsed area, for he could see a path ahead and to his right that appeared to slant down into the ruins. A cement table, he thought. By some railroad tracks, the man said.

  This might be a waste of a couple of hours, when there were hardly sixteen hours left.

  He reminded himself that Fakhouri was working toward the same goal that Isaac Laquedem had been pursuing, and therefore Santiago wanted him to succeed. And, more importantly, Fakhouri was in conflict with the people who had killed Laquedem.

  Under his sweatshirt Santiago could feel the medallion that had belonged to Laquedem. He even felt that old Laquedem’s ghost was with him sometimes—not communicating anything, just . . . watching over him. And that wasn’t impossible, since Laquedem, like Vickery and Castine, had once been to the Labyrinth afterworld and back, alive, and had not been the same as ordinary people after that. The difference had shown up in odd insights the old man had sometimes had—like knowing who had been in a room an hour earlier, or what the headline on a newspaper had been even when the newspaper machine was empty. The insights generally followed brief interludes when Laquedem had seemed to be blind and deaf, and Santiago had worried about the old man’s health.

  Laquedem had been able to sense Vickery and Castine, since they too had fallen into the Labyrinth and come out again, and so their souls were torqued in the same way as his; he had known that Vickery was up around Barstow, and that Castine was somewhere back east. But after a while he had stopped being able to sense them—he had still sometimes seemed to lose consciousness briefly, but when he recovered he had just muttered about some mezurgag house, and refused to elaborate. Santiago had heard the old man use that term before, and had gathered that it meant something like rotten.

  When Laquedem became aware of what Harlowe was trying to do, he had tried to find Vickery for help in stopping it—He owes me, the old man had said—but Harlowe’s people had killed Laquedem before he had been able to locate Vickery.

  Santiago shied away now from the memory of Laquedem suddenly pitching forward on a Santa Monica Boulevard sidewalk, hitting the pavement face-down, with blood pooling out around his head and the gunshot echoing back from nearby storefronts.

  Santiago kicked a pebble over the edge of the cliff and took a deep breath of the cold sea air.

  Three years ago Laquedem had found Santiago hiding in a packing crate behind a Home Depot on Figueroa. The boy’s parents had been killed by a speeding car down near San Diego only a month or so earlier, and he had made his way, mostly alone, to the perilous streets of Los Angeles; and by the time Laquedem had found him he had been sick and nearly starving. Laquedem had given him food and money and employment, and, more than that, the equivalent of a living father.

  Santiago had now reached the path that led down to the ruins and the sea. It wasn’t steep, and he was able to look around at the weird landscape as he walked down the slope. The wild, garish graffiti on all the tumbled cement slabs was what first caught his eye—sprawling stylized letters spelling out incomprehensible words or names, the bright blobs of color seeming to dim the natural tans and blacks of the dirt and rocks.

  The slabs were scattered everywhere down here, some of them still fairly lined up in the order they’d had when they’d been streets—Santiago could see the curbs along the interrupted edges, and wondered what cars had parked there, before 1929; and whether by moonlight the shadows of those long-gone cars might show up on the old pavement sections. He shivered in the chilly wind and moved faster.

  The path broadened out as it curved around to the west, and to his left an eroded ridge stood between him and the sea; it was impossible to tell whether the crooked striations in the ridge wall were sedimentary rock or buried masonry.

  In the same moment that he heard someone up ahead singing, Santiago saw the twelve-foot long steel bar that stretched in a shallow arc from a fragment of broken stone to a dirt bank; and a few steps further he saw the person who was singing. It was a tall, white-bearded old man on a nearby tilted slab, in a ragged gray sportcoat and baggy corduroy trousers and worn sneakers, and at first Santiago thought the man was doing a dance on the slab.

  The wind was whistling in the bare branches of a tree growing sideways behind the old man, but Santiago caught some words of what he was singing: “We left behind the old gray shore, climbed to the sky . . . ”

  And Santiago recognized the man. This was the brujo who had been in the ChakraSys Dumpster yesterday afternoon, when Vickery and Castine had been there . . . and in the past year Santiago had occasionally seen him talking to solitary figures on the little islands in the L.A. River by Dodger Stadium, and Santiago knew that ghosts often found their way to those islands.

  The brujo noticed him, and stopped singing and scuffing the cement block.

  “You wear two people,” the old man grated, “on your wrists. Do they control your hands, are you a puppet?”

  It jarred Santiago that this old derelict was able to sense the subsumed ghosts of his parents in his leather wristbands, and he pushed away the memory of their tumbled and broken bodies on the 5 freeway shoulder.

  “Who are those you talk to,” Santiago countered, “on the islands in the river?”

  Behind a blowing fringe of white hair, he old brujo’s blue eyes were bright in his tanned face. “The shadows of men who have missed the train,” he said, more softly. He glanced down at the slab he was standing on. “And I think you’re a puppet for a man who wants to derail it.”

  Santiago waved toward the single derelict Red Car rail that arched for a short distance over the uneven dirt, and laughed. “It’s been derailed since 1929.”

  “You know the train I mean, I think.” The old man rearranged his feet on the graffiti-vivid slab. “Would you prevent God?”

  “I want to look at that cement block you’re standing on.”

  The old man stood up straight, and squared his shoulders. Up on that slab he seemed as tall as the palm trees. “Your puppet hands can’t move me.”

  Santiago thought for a moment, then stepped back and reached into the sagging pocket of his hoodie and pulled out the gun he had scavenged last year, a .40 caliber Sig-Sauer semi-automatic. He lifted it to point at the ragged base of the slab. “You might miss the train yourself,” he said.

  The old man twisted his head like a bird, looking with one eye and then the other. “A boy,” he said thoughtfully, “but boys younger than you kill people. And you can see ghosts, on the islands.” He stepped back and hopped down off the slab. “It means nothing anyway. Wystan was blind by the time he put a chisel to that stone, did you know that? He was only trying to cut his name, memorialize himself, but he failed even in that.”

  Santiago moved forward and waved the gun; the old man backed away another couple of yards.

  The surface of the stone was streaked with red and blue lines that formed broad, stylized letters—presumably someone’s more recent try at memorializ
ing a name—but the slanting morning sun cast shadows in old grooves that had not been quite filled in with layers of paint. Wystan had cut deeply with his chisel.

  Santiago could see the outlines of an inverted T, and below that, two parallel lines that seemed to be just sawtooth zig-zags.

  “A cross,” said the old man, “or a blind man’s best attempt at one. And then his fucked up cursive signature. You can’t read it. They don’t teach cursive writing in school anymore, do they?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Santiago, stepping back.

  For several seconds the old brujo just stared across the slab at the boy, his white mane tossing in the wind. “Tell your puppeteer,” he said finally, “to kill the messenger, not the message. One burden to be borne, never to die.”

  Santiago shoved the gun back into his hoodie pocket, then, without replying, turned and ran back the way he had come. He was all for killing the messenger, but Laquedem had wanted to kill the message too, and Santiago was determined to carry out Laquedem’s intentions.

  Vickery steered into the drive-through lane at a McDonald’s on Wilshire to get Sausage McMuffins for the girls and hotcakes for Fakhouri, then dropped them off a block further east at the Chase Bank Building, where the Consulate General of the Arab Republic of Egypt occupied the eighteenth floor. Before ruefully relinquishing his car, Fakhouri had taken the girls’ hands and then paused on the sidewalk to look back at Vickery and sigh heavily. “Stymie them, if you can,” he said, “and I’ll be working at doing the same.”

  Vickery had nodded, waved to the two girls, and pressed the accelerator.

  “Fairfax is the next street,” he told Castine as he shifted lanes. “You want to try Canter’s again?”

  “Hah. Sure, why not? I can clean up a bit and change in the ladies’ room.” She sat back and nodded. “I hardly got to look at the menu on Monday.”

  Vickery turned left on Fairfax, then stopped for a red light at Sixth Street. His window was down, and a young woman in the crosswalk halted to give him a blank look and say, “Do you enjoy doing things like going to the bathroom?”

  She sneezed then, and resumed walking. Vickery and Castine both stared after her.

  Castine opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Vickery said, “Don’t say ‘Only in L.A.’”

  “That wasn’t what I was going to say.” When Vickery raised his eyebrows inquiringly she just shook her head.

  The light turned green and he sped up and caught the light at the next intersection; and within minutes he was turning in to the Canter’s parking lot.

  When they had got out of the car and Vickery had locked it, the parking attendant walked up. “Or spending a third of your life unconscious?” the man remarked as he handed Vickery a green validation ticket.

  “What?” said Castine.

  The man blinked and looked at her. “I didn’t say anything.”

  Castine seemed ready to argue, but Vickery took her arm and led her toward the sidewalk. “I don’t think he did,” he told her.

  They walked quickly up the sidewalk toward the door of Canter’s, but two pedestrians spoke to them before they reached it: a woman leading two children paused to remark, “Evolution moved on from unicellular life,” and a young man looked away from his phone to add, “and intelligent life on earth is about to move on from isolated, conflicted individuals.” Both speakers seemed uneasy immediately afterward, and hurried away.

  Castine gave Vickery a haggard look. “This is like what happened day before yesterday, with that girl in MacArthur Park. With the bicycle.”

  “Join me,” said an overweight man just stepping out of Canter’s. “Know everything, live forever.” He gave an embarrassed cough and walked quickly away.

  “Yes,” Vickery said to Castine. He was absently snapping his fingers, thinking. “It’s the black hole thing Ragotskie mentioned. Random people saying what the egregore people are thinking.”

  Castine had stepped to the curb and was looking fearfully from one passing pedestrian to the next, clearly expecting more enigmatic, helpless statements. “It’s Harlowe himself,” she said. “He’s talking to us, isn’t he? Does that mean he knows where we are?”

  “I don’t . . . think so,” said Vickery. “It seems more like a radio broadcast, and we’re like FM radios—with varying frequencies—while everybody else is AM. That’s what Ragotskie said, remember? These people are involuntary radios. But just in case—I bet we could knock down the transmitter.”

  A teenage boy on a skateboard skidded to an awkward halt beside Castine. “All your guilts will vanish,” he said, and a woman getting out of a car at the curb added, “Be loved by everyone, which is yourself.”

  Castine turned a haunted look on Vickery. “Knock it down how?”

  He wiped his hand across his mouth and looked up and down the street, then back toward the parking lot. “You won’t like it.”

  “Sebastian!” Castine began shrilly; then went on more quietly, “I haven’t liked one bit of this!”

  “Okay. Last night when you told the twins that they pushed us into that vision—when I nearly wrecked the car yesterday on the 15 freeway—one of them said, ‘It made Uncle Simon fall down,’ and the other one said Harlowe experienced the vision, because we did. I think those girls, in touch with us and with Harlowe, opened him up to our vision of the old house in the canyon. Maybe if we broadcast that, it’ll break his transmitter, or at least disrupt this broadcast.”

  “You want to—do you mean we should deliberately see that old-house vision again?”

  “It doesn’t hurt us, Ingrid! That we know of.” He waved back toward the parking lot. “I think we should sit in the car while we do it. We won’t be able to see or hear anything that’s going on here and now, but I’ll leave the door unlocked, and if anybody shakes my shoulder I’ll feel it and say we’re just meditating, leave us alone.”

  “But—I don’t want to see that house again.”

  “You want everybody on the street to keep telling us what a great thing the egregore is?”

  Castine shook her head bewilderedly, but walked back with Vickery toward the parking lot.

  “The old mythological God,” said a woman in shorts and sunglasses as she passed them, “consisted of only three persons.”

  A bearded man seated against the wall looked up from his HOMELESS sign as they hurried past and growled, “—but the new, real God will have billions of persons! Be Him! Own the universe!”

  In the parking lot, Vickery opened the car’s passenger side door for Castine and waved at the parking attendant. “Just going to meditate a bit before breakfast!” he called, not wanting the man to come over and tell them something else about the egregore god.

  When he had got in on the driver’s side and closed the door, Vickery raised his right hand. “At this point,” he said, “I bet we don’t even have to focus past the immediate moment anymore—I bet it’ll happen if we just hold hands, like by the freeway bridge Monday night.”

  “Shit. Okay.” Castine lifted her left hand, which had band-aids on three fingertips now, and clasped his.

  The world was suddenly dark and silent. Vickery could see three bright dots in a line, bobbing and crossing in front of one another; they were growing brighter and bigger. In the moment before they swung around out of his view, he recognized them as motorcycle headlights.

  Now he saw glowing copper rectangles—a tall one in front of him and two smaller ones flanking it at the level of its mid-point. A moment later they sprang into perspective, and Vickery recognized them as an open door with a window on either side; and he realized that they weren’t actually expanding and descending—they were growing closer, and his viewpoint was incrementally rising.

  He was mounting a set of steps, and then the sides of the open doorway disappeared in his peripheral vision as he moved into the house. The doorway was narrow, and he was disoriented to feel Castine’s hand still clasping his as his viewpoint passed across the threshold.

/>   A long room filled his vision now, lit by bare light bulbs swinging on cords from a cracked plaster ceiling, and on the far wall he glimpsed a yard-tall wooden board with the carved figure of a man-headed hawk attached to it; and though Vickery’s viewpoint stayed horizontal, he was peripherally able to see that the floor was uneven rippled sand. A number of people were dimly visible, standing by a glassless window to the right or sitting on a couple of tilted couches on the sand straight ahead, but Vickery’s involuntary gaze swiveled so quickly to the left that he caught only an impression of beards and beads and a couple of people apparently smeared with black mud.

  His view now was of a spiral staircase with incongruous metal-tubing banisters; a woman who appeared to be in her mid-30s was hurrying down the stairs, her face starkly lit by the swinging light bulbs, and a moment later Vickery saw the familiar lean-faced man in the open Nehru jacket coming down behind her. The man’s mouth was opening and closing, and he slapped the woman’s shoulder, but he stopped halfway down the stairs and looked directly into Vickery’s viewpoint. His eyes narrowed and he pulled the revolver from his belt.

  He quickly raised it, and the flare of the gunshot became bright morning daylight as the view of the Canter’s parking lot and the rhythm of traffic on Fairfax flooded back into Vickery’s perception.

  He was slumped against the door in Fakhouri’s Nissan, and Castine, beside him, slowly unclasped her hand from his. He realized he’d been holding his breath, and exhaled.

  “Jesus,” Castine whispered,and it sounded like prayer. She cleared her throat and went on, “He shot us, didn’t he?”

  “He shot at us, at least,” said Vickery. He straightened up in the seat and rubbed one hand over his face. “I wonder who the hell we are, in those visions!”

  “Maybe that was the end of them,” said Castine. “Maybe our . . . host got killed, there.”

  “That’d be nice, I guess.” Vickery pressed the button to roll down the window, but the key wasn’t in the ignition, so he opened the door and breathed rapidly in the cold fresh air.