Expiration Date (19 page)

Obstadt exhaled slowly, aware again of the sun on his bare forearms, the breeze tickling between the coarse gray hairs. He uncrossed his legs and sat up straight, his man’s body still feeling strange to him for a moment or two. And, he thought, I now weigh one three-thousandth of an ounce more than I did a minute ago.

He took a deep breath of the chilly morning air. The memories were fading—an old woman dying of a heart attack, after kids and a long life. He knew that the details would filter into his dreams…along with the details of all the others. Nice not to have a wino or a crackhead for once.

“Loretta’s a clown,” he repeated hoarsely, dragging his attention back across the vicarious decades. “She wins chips in this low-level game, but never cashes ‘em in to move up to a bigger table; though she’d obviously like to, with her Velcro and her vegetarianism.”

He rubbed his fists over his gray crew cut, knuckling his scalp. “Still,” he went on, “some big chips do sometimes slide across her table, and she’s all excited about one now.” He stood up and stretched, flexing his broad shoulders. “I’m going to take it away from her.” He thought of brightly painted toys under Christmas trees. “Children,” he said thoughtfully. “Does Loretta have any, biological or adopted? Find out, and find them if she does. Keep monitoring her calls.” He looked at Canov. “What have you got on Topper?”

“Spooky,” Canov corrected him. “Nicholas Bradshaw. I think the courts still have warrants out on him. We’re pretty sure he’s dead.”

“Loretta’s pretty sure he’s not.”

Canov made a tossing gesture with one hand. “Or she’s trying to fake somebody out by
pretending
she thinks so. He does seem to be reliably dead. We got a broad spectrum of media out to do resonance tests at the houses he lived in, and in his old law office in Seal Beach, and they found no ringing lifelines that worked out to be him. The one that seems to be
his
thuds dead at around 1975, when he disappeared.”

“What kind of
mediums?”
Obstadt hated faggoty overprecise language.

Canov shrugged. “Hispanic
brujas
, a team of psychics from USC, autistic kids, ghost-sniffing dogs, even; a renegade Catholic priest, two Buddhist monks; we fed LSD to some poker players and had them do sixty or seventy hands of seven-stud with a Tarot deck in the law office one night. We had some blind fencers in, and videotaped ’em, watching for spontaneous disengages, but we didn’t see any dowsing effects. And all the EM stuff, TV sets and current and compasses, behave normally.”

“Okay, so he’s dead,” said Obstadt, “and his ghost hasn’t been hanging out at the places you checked. Is it wandering around?”

“Not if he died anywhere locally—it looks like he just dispersed, or was eaten. He published an as-told-to book in 1962,
Spooked
, but no copy we’ve found in libraries or bookstores or junk stores has any flyspecks on it at all, and we located a dozen copies of his high-school yearbooks, all of them with clean pages where his picture is. His parents were both cremated—Neptune Society—but his godfather’s buried at the Hollywood Cemetery next to Paramount Studios, and we keep scattering dirt on the old man’s marker, but the only time it’s cleaned off is when the maintenance people do it.”

Obstadt nodded. “‘Kay.” He stood up and crossed the carpeted floor to an east-facing window. “And right now go to Venice, will you? Check out this business with the fish and the lobsters.”

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

O
NE
of them had finally been for real. Maybe.

Angelica Anthem Elizalde stood in the center of the tiny
botánica
shop and stared resentfully at the morbid items for sale. On one wall were hung a hundred little cellophane bags of dried herbs, along with crude cloth “voodoo dolls” that cost two dollars apiece; on the opposite wall, on shelves, were ranked dozens of little bottles with labels like
ABRE CAMINO
and
LE DE VETE DE AQUI
—“Road Opener” oil and “Stay Away Law” oil—and aerosol spray cans labeled
ST. MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL
and
HIGH JOHN THE CONQUEROR
(“Spray all areas of your surroundings. Make the sign of the Cross. Repeat spraying as necessary”)
. In the glass case by the cash register were a lot of books with colored pictures of Jesus and Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Devil on the covers—one, called
Conjuro del Tobacco
, by Guillermo Ceniza-Bendiga, was apparently a handbook on how to tell the future by watching the ash on cigars.

She had sat in the bus station on Seventh Street until dawn, and then stashed her canvas bag in a locker and walked east, over the Fourth Street bridge into the old Boyle Heights area of L.A., where she’d grown up after the move from Norco. When the police had brought bloodied Mexicans into Lincoln Heights Receiving Hospital, just a few blocks up Soto here, they’d always just called the area Hollenbeck Division, but Elizalde had liked the words
Boyle Heights
, and she had always tried to focus on the old Craftsman and Victorian houses on the narrow streets, and not on the bars and liquor stores and
ropa usada
used clothing stores.

And she had always been somehow personally embarrassed by
botánica
shops like this one.

The two young women behind the counter were conversing in fast, colloquial Spanish, ignoring Elizalde.

Elizalde frowned, not sure how she felt about being mistaken for an Anglo; but she just blinked around impatiently and gave no indication that she understood what was being said. One of the women assured the other that the tourist would soon get bored and leave; the other resumed the topic of laundry, reminding her friend that Saturday was Halloween and that she had better not leave her clothing
out if it rained that night:
“La ropa estará mojado en to espiritu, y olada mal por meses”—The clothes will be soaked in ghost-tea, and stink for months.

This is the vein, all right, Elizalde thought dourly. All the creepy stuff that I was brought up to believe was orthodox Roman Catholicism.

She remembered her surprise when a fellow student at UCLA had mentioned being a Roman Catholic. Elizalde had asked him how an intelligent person could really believe, for example, that rolling a raw egg over a child would cure fever—and then she’d been humiliated when he’d assured her that there was nothing like that in Catholic doctrine, and asked her where she had got such an idea.

She had of course chosen to laugh it off as a joke, rather than tell him the truth: that her mother had viewed taking Communion at church, and curing afflictions by rolling eggs over sick people—or by burning cornflowers, or eating papers with incantations scrawled on them—as all part of the same faith.

A plastic lighter and an open pack of Marlboros lay on the glass counter; and Elizalde, reminded by the cigar-ash book of a trick her grandmother used to perform, impulsively laid a dime on the counter and took one of the cigarettes. The women stopped talking and stared at her, but didn’t object when she lit it.

She puffed rapidly, not inhaling, and when she had a half-inch of ash she tapped it off onto the glass and with a fingertip rapidly smeared it into the shape of a six-pointed Star of David. Then she puffed hard at the cigarette for a full half-minute, while the two women on the other side of the counter watched cautiously. Elizalde wiped her right hand hard down the flank of her jeans.

Finally she tapped the long ash into her dry palm; she squeezed it, rubbed it around with her fingers, and pressed her hand down onto the center of the star.

If this was done correctly, with the heel of the hand imprinting a beardlike semicircle and the curled-under fingernails scraping clean spaces that looked like shadowed eye sockets and then jiggling across the ash forehead, the result was a face that was plausibly that of Jesus, identifiable by the beard and a sketchy crown of thorns. Elizalde’s grandmother had reduced grown men to tears with the apparently miraculous image.

Elizalde lifted her hand away—it had worked well enough.

One of the women crossed herself, and the other opened her mouth as if to say something—but then the ash pattern on the glass started to move.

Elizalde had glanced down when the women’s eyes had gone wide and they’d stepped back, and at first she’d thought a draft was messing up her crude picture; but the ash image was
re-forming
itself. The jagged streaks that had been the crown of thorns became straggly lines like unruly bangs, and the broad smear of beard crowded up and became the jowls of a fat face. The ash around the eye gaps arranged itself in a finely striated pattern, representing baggy wrinkles.

Fleetingly it occurred to Elizalde that her palms were too damp now to do the trick again. The blood was singing in her ears, and she gripped the metal edge of the display case because her sense of balance was gone.

She recognized the face. It was Frank Rocha, one of the patients who had died during that last group-therapy session at Elizalde’s clinic on Halloween night two years ago.

Then the blur of the picture’s mouth coalesced into clarity like solid curds forming in vinegared milk—and the mouth opened, and began moving. It was of course silent, and Elizalde couldn’t read lips, but she convulsively slapped her hand across the ash image, nearly hard enough to break the glass.

Her expression when she looked up at the two women must have been wild for they backed up against the pay telephone on the back wall.

Elizalde dropped the cigarette onto the linoleum floor and ground it out with the toe of her sneaker.
“Yo volveré,”
she said,
“quando usted no está tan ocupado.”
I’ll be back when you’re not so busy.

She turned and strode out of the
botánica
onto the Soto Street sidewalk. The morning air was cold in her open, panting mouth, but she could feel a trickle of sweat run down her left-side ribs.

That
really was
Frank Rocha’s face, she thought. God!

Her own face was as cold as if she had been caught in some horrifying crime, and she wanted to hide from this street, from this city, from the very sky.

She still had the letter from Frank Rocha in her wallet, in the hip pocket of these very jeans. She wanted to throw it away, throw the whole wallet away, every bit of ID.

One of them was finally for real, she insisted to herself even as she was furiously shaking her head and nearly sprinting away from the incriminating counter in the
botánica
. That last…séance, two years ago, actually fucking
worked
. It
did
! Dr. Alden, drunken old asshole, was
right
to make me resign. I should have listened to him, listened to the damned nurses, even though they were all wrong in their
reasons
for criticizing me. I
killed
those three patients who died in that clinic conference room, and I’m
responsible
for the ones who were injured, and the ones who are probably still in one or another of the state mental hospitals.

Angelica Elizalde vividly remembered the two times she had been called in to Dr. Alden’s office.

“C
OME IN
,” he had told her when she had walked down the hall to his ostentatiously book-lined cubicle. “Do please close the door, Dr. Elizalde, and sit down.”

Alden had been the chief of the attending staff at the county hospital on Santa Fe in Huntington Park; he was a political appointee with unkempt hair and cigarette-stained fingers, and drunk half the time. Elizalde had been thirty-two years old, a psychiatrist with the title of “Director of Medical Education for Psychiatric Training.” She had been at the county hospital for two years at that time, and in ‘90 was making $65,000 a year.

And she had felt that she earned it. After her internship she had stayed on at the county hospital for genuinely altruistic reasons, not just because it was the path of least resistance—the third-world-like situation provided experience that a more gentrified area couldn’t give her, and she had wanted to help the sort of people who ordinarily wouldn’t have access to psychiatric care.

Alden had reached across his cluttered desk to hand her a folded letter. “The charge nurse charged in here this morning with this,” he said, smiling awkwardly. “You’d better read it.”

The letter from the charge nurse to Alden had been a denunciation of Elizalde and her techniques; it concluded with, “Nurses and staff have lost confidence in Dr. Elizalde and would not feel comfortable carrying out her orders in the future.”

Elizalde had known that every hospital is virtually run by the nurses, and that no chief of staff could afford to displease them; but she had looked up at Alden defiantly. “My patients get better. Ask the nurses themselves how my patients do, compared with those of the other doctors.”

Alden’s mouth was still kinked in a forced smile, but he was frowning now. “No. I don’t need to ask them. You must know as well as I do that your methods have no place in a modern hospital. Voodoo dolls! Ouija boards! And how many of those candles have you got on your shelves in there, the tall ones with…
saints
, and, and
God
, and the
Virgin Mary
painted on them? It’s not helpful to—a
white-bearded
God,
Caucasian
, a
man
, leaning out of the clouds and holding a scepter! And Rastafari paraphernalia, Santeria stuff! Your office smells like a church, and looks like some kind of ignorant Mexican fortune-teller’s tent!”