999

by Al Sarrantonio

  When I opened my eyes I saw that I was in the alley behind Helicon. In my hand was a lotus flower of the purest white. As I touched its delicate petals, I knew this was what Lily had left me as proof that our time together had been no bizarre hallucination brought on by temporary madness or the mescal.

  I suddenly thought of Mike. I jerked open the back door and rushed inside, ready to call 911.

  “Hey, buddy,” Mike said from his accustomed place behind the bar, “that was a helluva piss you took.”

  Stupefied, I merely blinked at him. “What?” Where were the smashed bottles and mirror, the bullet holes and the blood? Mike’s blood.

  “But, goddamn— You’re okay—” I was trying not to stammer.

  “Except for a shitload of bills I have to pay, of course I am,” Mike said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Because you were dead, that’s why!” I looked around wildly. “Where’s the crazy black guy with the machine pistol?”

  “The only crazy guy I see is you. You’re the only one’s been in here this morning.” Mike gave me the fish-eye. “You know, you’ve already had two mescals. Maybe that’s enough till you get some breakfast in you. I’ll fry you up some eggs.”

  I peered into my favorite booth, looking for the empty glass I’d left there, but there was nothing on the table save liquor rings, reminders of binges past. “But I’ve already had three drinks.”

  “Yeah?” Mike shoveled grease to the back of the griddle with a blackened spatula. He cracked open a couple of eggs and they started to sizzle. “Then you started drinking at home, my son, ‘cause you’ve only had two here.”

  “Wait a minute.” I was turning the lotus flower around and around, thinking about Lily and what the power of her mind had been able to achieve. “What time is it?”

  Mike, still with a puzzled look on his face, glanced at his watch. “Ten twenty-eight.”

  “It’s Monday morning, right?”

  Poor Mike looked as if he didn’t know whether to tend the eggs or call the boys at Bellevue. “Yeah, right. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. But possibly I did. The call from Herman had come at ten-thirty. It seemed as if I was back at the moment before it all began. Could this have been the final extraordinary act Lily had performed with her mind, to give us both a chance to be together one last time before she died? “But I’ve got a funny feeling the phone is going to ring.”

  “Yeah, right,” he guffawed. “And my name’s Rudolph W. Giuliani.

  The phone rang, and Mike started. “Jesus Christ,” he said, staring at me.

  “Maybe I ought to answer it.” I reached for the phone and heard Herman’s voice. Yep, that’s exactly what she had done. I looked at Mike and winked. “It’s for me.”

  Tim Powers

  ITINERARY

  I consider Tim Powers a new friend, since I made his acquaintance only through my pursuit of his work for this book. We hit it off immediately, and his editor at Avon only hates me a little bit for taking him away from his current novel project to write the following story. This is an event, since Powers writes an average of one short story per decade.

  For those of you with your heads so firmly stuck in the sand of the horror/suspense field that you’re not aware of his work, since winning science fiction’s Phillip K. Dick Memorial Award for his novel The Anubis Gates (which describes seventeenth-century England in minute detail), Powers has been considered one of the most important voices in the sf and fantasy fields; his work (other novels: Earthquake Weather, Last Call, Expiration Date) exhibits his own brand of “magic realism” combining elements of sf, fantasy, horror, the occult, psychiatry, surrealism, comedy, history, and just about anything else he feels like throwing into the brew—with magical results.

  As you re about to see, we’re lucky to have him.

  The day before the Santa Ana place blew up, the telephone rang at about noon. I had just walked the three blocks back from Togo’s with a tuna-fish sandwich, and when I was still out in the yard I heard the phone ringing through the open window; I ran up the porch steps, trying to fumble my keys out of my pocket without dropping the Togo’s bag, and I was panting when I snatched up the receiver in the living room. “Hello?”

  I thought I could hear a hissing at the other end, but no voice. It was October, with the hot Santa Ana winds shaking the dry pods off the carob trees, and the receiver was already slick with my sweat. I used to sweat a lot in those days, what with the beer and the stress and all. “Hello?” I said again, impatiently. “Am I talking to a short circuit?” Sometimes my number used to get automatic phone calls from an old abandoned oil tank in San Pedro, and I thought I had rushed in just to get another of those.

  It was a whisper that finally answered me, very hoarse; but I could tell it was a man: “Gunther! Jesus, boy—this is—Doug Olney, from Neff High School! You remember me, don’t you?”

  “Doug? Olney?” I wondered if he had had throat cancer. It had been nearly twenty years since I’d spoken to him. “Sure I remember! Where are you? Are you in town—”

  “No time to talk. I don’t want to—change any of your plans.” He seemed to be upset. “Listen, a woman’s gonna call your number in a minute; she’s gonna ask for me. You don’t know her. Say I just left a minute ago, okay?”

  “Who is she—” I began, but he had already hung up.

  As soon as I lowered the receiver into the cradle, the phone rang again. I took a deep breath and then picked it up again. “Hello?”

  It was a woman, sure enough, and she said, “Is Doug Olney there?” I remember thinking that she sounded like my sister, who’s married, in a common-law and probably unconsummated sense, to an Iranian who lives at De Gaulle Airport in France; though I hadn’t heard from my sister since Carter was president.

  I took a deep breath. “He just left,” I said helplessly.

  “I bet.” A shivering sigh came over the line. “But I can’t do any more.” Again I was holding a dead phone.

  We grew up in a big old Victorian house on Lafayette Avenue in Buffalo. The third floor had no interior partitions or walls, since it was originally designed to be a ballroom; by the time we were living there the days of balls were long gone, and that whole floor was jammed to capacity with antique furniture, wall to wall, floor to twelve-foot ceiling, back to front. My sister and I were little kids then, and we could crawl all through that vast lightless volume, up one canted couch and across the underside of an inverted table, squeezing past rolled carpets and worming between Regency chair legs. Of course there was no light at all unless we crowded into a space near one of the dust-filmed windows; and climbing back down to the floor, and then tracing the molding and the direction of the floor planks to the door, was a challenge. When we were finally able to stand up straight again out in the hall, we’d be covered with sour dust and not eager to explore in there again soon.

  The nightmare I always had as a child was of having crept and wriggled to the very center of that room all by myself in the middle of the night, pausing roughly halfway between the floor and ceiling in pitch darkness on some sloped cabinet or sleigh bed—and then hearing a cautious scuffle from some remote cubic yard out there, in that three-dimensional maze of Cabriole legs and cartouches that you had to touch to learn the shapes of. And in the dream I knew it was some lonely boy who had hidden away up there with all the furniture years and years ago, and that he wanted to play, to show me whatever old shoe buckles or pocket watches or fountain pens he had found in drawers and coat pockets. I always pictured him skeletal and pale, though of course he’d be careful never to get near enough to the windows to be seen, and I knew he’d speak in a whisper.

  I always woke up from that dream while it was still dark outside my window, and so tense that I’d simply lie without moving a muscle until I could see the morning light through my eyelids.

  I was in the yard of the Santa Ana house early the next morning, sipping at a can of Coors beer and blinking tears out of my eyes as
I tried to focus on the tomato vines through the sun glare on the white garden wall, when I heard a pattering like rain among the leaves. I sat down abruptly in the damp grass to push the low leaves aside.

  It was bits of glass falling out of the sky. I touched one shard, and it was as hot as a serving plate. A cracking and thumping started up behind me then, and I fell over backward trying to stand up in a hurry. Red clay roof tiles were shattering violently on the grass and tearing the jasmine branches. The air was sharp with the acid smell of burned, broken stone, and then a hard punch of scorchingly hot air lifted me off my feet and rolled me over the top of the picnic table. I was lying facedown and breathless in the grass when the bass-note boom deafened me and stretched my hair out straight, so that it stood up from my scalp for days; I still have trouble combing it down flat, not that I try frequently.

  The yard looked like a battlefield. All the rosebushes were broken off flush with the ground, and the ceramic duck that we’d had forever was broken into a hundred pieces. I was dimly glad that the duck had been able to tour California once in his otherwise uneventful life.

  The eastern end of the house, where the kitchen had been, was broken wide open, with tar paper strips standing up along the roof edge like my hair, and beams and plaster chunks lay scattered out across the grass. Everything inside the kitchen was gone, the table and the refrigerator and the pictures on the wall. Propane is heavier than air, and it had filled the kitchen from the floor upward, until it had reached the pilot light on the stove.

  The explosion had cracked my ribs and burned my eyebrows off and scorched my throat, and I think I got sick from radon or asbestos that had been in the walls. I took a day-long ride on a bus out here to San Bernardino to recuperate at my uncle’s place, the same rambling old ranch-style house where we lived happily for a year right after we moved from New York, before my mother found the Santa Ana house and began making payments on it.

  The ceramic duck might have been the first thing my mother bought for the house. He generally just sat in the yard, but shortly after my sister and I turned seven he was stolen. We didn’t get very excited about that, but we were awestruck when the duck mysteriously showed up on the lawn again, six months later—because propped up against him in the dewy grass was a photo album full of pictures of the ceramic duck in various locations around the state: the duck in front of the flower bank at the entrance to Disneyland, the duck on a cable car seat in San Francisco, the duck sitting between the palm prints of Clark Gable; along with a couple of more mundane shots, like one of the duck just leaning against an avocado tree in somebody’s yard out behind a weather-beaten old house. I think all the stories you hear about world-traveling lawn gnomes these days started with the humbler travels of our duck, back in ‘59. Or vice versa, I suppose.

  My uncle’s place hasn’t changed at all since my sister and I explored every hollow and gully of the weedy acre and climbed the sycamores along the back fence so many years ago—our carved initials are still visible on the trunk of one of them, I discover, still only a yard above the dirt, though my sister isn’t interested in seeing them now. There’s a surprising lot of our toys, too, old wooden Lincoln Logs and Nike missile launchers; I’ve gathered them from among the weeds and put them near the back of the garage where my uncle supposedly keeps his beer, but she doesn’t want to see them either.

  Always in San Bernardino you see women on the noonday sidewalks wearing shorts and halter tops, and from behind they look young and shapely with their long brown legs and blond hair; but when the car you’re in has driven past them, and you hike around in the passenger seat to look back, their faces are weary, and shockingly old. And at night along Base Line, under the occasional clusters of sodium-vapor lights, you can see that the bar parking lots are jammed with cars, but you can generally also see four or five horses tied up to a post outside the bar door. My uncle says this is a semidesert climate, right below the Cajon Pass and Barstow in the high desert, and so we get a lot of patches of mirage.

  I’11 let my sister drive me as far as the Stater Brothers market on Highland, though that doesn’t cheer her up, probably because I mostly shoplift the fruits and cheese and crackers that are all I can keep down anymore. She flew back from France after I hurt myself, and when she can borrow an old car from a friend she drives out to visit me. She keeps trying to trick me into coming back to live in Santa Ana again, or anywhere besides my uncle’s house—she wants to drive me to a hospital, actually—but I don’t dare. I’ve told her not to tell anyone where I am, and I’ve taken a false name, not that anyone asks me.

  Her family, I have to admit, has given her a lot of grief. Her husband was born in a part of Iran that was under British jurisdiction, and when he tried to go back there after going to school in England the Iranians said he was an enemy of the Shah; they took his passport and gave him some papers that permitted him to leave but never come back, and he got as far as Charles de Gaulle Airport, but France wouldn’t let him in without a passport and Customs wouldn’t let him get on another plane. He’s lived on the Boutique Level of Terminal One now for decades, sleeping on a plastic couch and watching TV, and Lufthansa flight attendants give him travel kits so that he can shave and brush his teeth. My sister met him there during a layover on a European tour my mother bought for her right after high school, and now she’s got a job and an apartment in Roissy so she can be near him. I keep telling her she’s going to lose her job, staying away like this, but she says she has no choice, because nobody else can get through to me the way she still can. I’m backward, she says.

  My uncle makes himself scarce when she drives up the dirt track out front in one beat old borrowed car or another; so does everybody. When I hobbled off the bus at his warped chain-link front gate, all scorched and blinking and hoarse and dizzy from the radon, he was waiting for me out in the front yard with his usual straw hat pulled down over his gray hair; all you really see is the bushy mustache. The house is empty now, just echoing rooms with one old black Bakelite telephone on the kitchen floor and a lot of wires sticking out of the walls where there used to be lights, but he told me I could sleep in my old room, and I’ve carried in some newspapers to make a nest in the corner there. I’m thinking about moving the nest into the closet.

  “Don’t bother anybody you might see here,” my uncle told me on that first day. “Just leave ‘em alone. They probably live here.”

  And I have seen a very old man in the kitchen, always crying quietly over the sink and wearing one of those senior citizen jumpsuits that zip up from the ankle to the neck; I’ve just nodded to him and discreedy shuffled past across the dusty linoleum. What could we have to say to each other that the other wouldn’t already know? And a couple of times I’ve seen two kids out at the far end of the backyard. Let them play, I figure. My uncle is generally walking around in circles behind the garage trying to find his beer. There’s a patch of mirage out there—if you step into the weeds by the edge of the driveway, walking away from the house, you find with no shift at all that you’ve just stepped onto the driveway, facing the house.

  “It’s been that way forever,” he told me one day when he was taking a break from it, sitting on the hood of his wrecked old truck. “But one night a few winters ago I stepped out there and wasn’t facing the house; and I was standing on one of your mom’s long-ago rosebushes. The flowers were open, like they thought it was day, and the leaves were warm. Time doesn’t pass, in mirages, everybody knows that—so I hopped right in the truck and bought two cases of Bud-weiser out of the cooler at Top Cat, and stashed ‘em there right by the rosebush. The next morning it was the two-for-one-step mirage again, but whenever it slacks off, I know where there’s a lot of cold beer.”

  I nodded a number of times, and so did he, and it was right after this conversation with him that I started keeping all our old toys back there.

  Yesterday my sister came rocking up the dirt driveway in a shiny green Edsel, and when she braked it in a cloud of dust and clanked
the door open I could see that she’d been crying at some point on the drive up. It’s a long drive, and it takes a lot out of her.

  My voice is gone because of the explosion having scorched my throat, so I stepped closer to her to be heard. “Come in the house and have … some water,” I rasped—awkwardly, because she’d doing all this for my sake. We don’t have any glasses, but she could drink it out of the faucet. “Or crackers,” I added.

  “I can’t stand to see the inside of the house,” she said crossly. “We had good times in this house, when we were all living in it.” She squinted out past the dogwood tree at the infinity of brown hillocks that is the backyard. “Let’s talk out there.”

  “You’re testy,” I noted as I followed her up the dirt driveway, past the house. She was wearing a blue sundress that clung to her sweaty back.

  “Why do you suppose that is, Gunther?”

  I glanced around quickly, but there wasn’t even a bird in the empty blue sky. “Doug,” I reminded her huskily, trying to project my frail voice. The name had been suggested by the phone call I’d got on the day before the explosion, and certainly Doug Olney himself would never hear about the deception, wherever he might be. “Always, you promised.”

  We were walking out past the end of the driveway among the burr-weeds now, and I saw her shoulders shrug wearily. “Why do you suppose that is—Mr. Olney?” she called back to me.

  I lengthened my stride to step up beside her. The soles of my feet must be tough, because the burrs never stick in my skin. “I bet it’s expensive to rent a classic Edsel,” I hazarded.

  “Yes, it is.” Her voice was flat and harsh. “Especially in the summer, with all the Mexican weddings. It’s a ‘57, but it must have a new engine or something in it—I could hardly see the signs on the old Route 66 today. Just Foothill Boulevard all the way. I may not be able to come out here again, get through to you, not even your own twin, who lived here, with you! Not even in a car from those days. And Hakim needs me too.” She turned to face me and stamped her foot. “He could figure some way to get out of that airport if he really wanted to! And look at you! Damn it—Doug—how long do you think a comatose body can live, even in a hospital like Western Medical, with its soul off hiding incognito somewhere?”