Expiration Date (24 page)

As far as Al had been concerned, he had carried his friend home.

And in this room, thirty-seven years later, the friend had finally left Al.

Al was forty-two by then, though he had never forgotten the drowning. In this dark, locked room he had been working with Dickson on a secret new project, the Kineto-phonograph, and late on a spring night in 1889 the two of them had tried the thing out. It was supposed to be a masking measure—and actually, as such, it had worked pretty well.

Dickson had set up a white screen on one wall, while Al had started up the big wood-and-brass machine on the other side of the room; as the machine whirred and buzzed, the screen glowed for a moment with blank white light, and then Al’s image appeared—already portly, with the resolute chin set now on a thick neck, the graying hair slicked back from the high, pale forehead—and then the image began to speak.

And the ghost of the drowned boy, confronted with an apparently split host, sprang away from Al and
ignited
in confusion.

A
BRUPTLY
K
OOTIE
was back in his own body and remembered who he was, but he couldn’t
see
—there was some hot, wet
framework
all over him. Shuddering violently, he reached up and clawed it off; it tore saggily as he dragged it over his head, but when he had flung it onto the railing of the cement steps he could see that it had been a sort of full-torso mask: the now-collapsed head of an old man with a coarse black-fur coat attached to the neck, and limp white fleshy hands lying askew at the ends of the sleeves, it smelled like a wet dog.

Kootie was shaking violently. The morning breeze in the stairwell was chilly on his face and in his wet hair, and he realized numbly that the slickness on his hands and face was blood, a whole lot of somebody’s
blood
. Profoundly needing to get away from whatever had happened here, he stumbled farther down the steps into the dim artificial light, unzipping his heavy flannel shirt. His throat was open, but he hadn’t started breathing again yet.

Standing on the concrete floor at the foot of the steps, he pulled off the heavy shirt, which was slick with more of the blood; the nylon lining was clean, though, and he wiped his face thoroughly and rubbed his hair with it. Then he pushed the sticky curls back off his forehead, wiped his hands on the last clean patch of quilted nylon, and flung the sodden bundle away behind him. His backpack had fallen to the concrete floor, but at this moment it was just one more blood-soaked encumbrance to be shed.

The shirt he had on underneath was a thin, short-sleeved polo shirt, but at least it had been shielded from the blood. He scuffed black furry slippers off of his Reeboks, wincing at the sight of the red smears on the white sneakers.
Good enough!
his mind was screaming.
Get out of here!

He ran back up the steps, hopping over the collapsed organic framework, and when he was back up on the pavement he hopped over a low retaining wall, down to the Hope Street sidewalk.

He was walking away fast, with a hop in every stride.

The brief vision of normal life that the Music Center had kindled in him was forgotten—his brain was still recoiling from having been violated by another personality, but his nervous system had turned his steps firmly south, toward hiding places. The shaking of his heartbeat had started his lungs working again, and he was breathing in fast gasps with a nearly inaudible whistling in his lungs.

The old man’s memories were still intolerably ringing in his head, and at every other step he exhaled sharply and shook his head, for along with the immediate clinging smells of dog and blood he could feel in the back of his nose the acrid reek of burned hair.

The little boy’s ghost had exploded in an instantaneous white flash halfway between Al and the movie screen, charring the screen and putting a calamitous halt to the world’s first motion picture, which, ahead of its time, had been a talkie.

A combusty.

Later, Al had explained the bandages over his burns as just the result of a crucible happening to blow up while he’d been near it, but of course the press had played it up.

The New York Times
headline for April 21, 1889, had read, EDISON BURNED BUT BUSY.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

E
VEN
on this Wednesday morning in October the Santa Monica Bay beaches were crowded—with surfers in black and turquoise wet suits paddling out across the unbroken blue of the deep water or skating in across the curling jade-green faces of the waves, and blankets and umbrellas and glossy brown bodies thickly dotting the pale sand, and cars and vans and bicycles glinting in the sun on the black asphalt of the parking lots.

On the mile and a half of narrow grassy park on the bluffs above Palisades Beach Road, just north of the Santa Monica Pier, the villages of tents and old refrigerator boxes had drawn a crowd of tourists to mingle gingerly with the resident homeless people, for there was some kind of spontaneous revival meeting going on throughout the whole stretch of Sleeping-bag Town. Six or eight old women abandoned their aluminum-can-filled shopping carts to hop bow-legged across the grass, growling
brrrm-brrrm
in imitation of motorcycle engines or howling like police sirens; then all paused at once and, even though they were yards and yards apart and separated by dozens of people, all shouted in unison, “Stop! You’re on a one-way road to Hell!” Ragged old men, evidently caught up in some kind of primitive Eucharistic hysteria, babbled requests that someone take their flesh and eat it; then all at the same instant fell to their knees and began swallowing stones and fistfuls of mud. Several tourists got sick. On the indoor merry-go-round at the Santa Monica Pier, children were crying and protesting that they didn’t like the scary faces in the air.

A mile, to the south, at Ocean Park, surfing was disrupted when nearly a hundred people went clumsily thrashing out into the water, shouting to each other and urgently calling out “Sister Aimee! Sister Aimee!” to some apparently imaginary swimmer in peril.

And south of that, at Venice Beach, several trucks and a skip-loader had been driven around the Pavilion and down onto the sand, where, with police clearing the
way, they slowly pushed their way through the crowd that had gathered around the big dead fish.

The thing was clearly dead—it was beginning to smell bad, and the crowd tended to be denser downwind of the fat woman who was feverishly puffing on one clove-scented cigarette after another.

N
ONE OF
the exhibitionist bodybuilders in the little fenced-in workout area had bothered to set down their barbells and get up off the padded benches to go look at the fish. And the girls in Day-Glo sunglasses and neon spandex went on splitting the crowd on Ocean Front Walk as they swept through on in-line skates, and the jugglers and musicians stayed by their money-strewn hats or guitar cases. Attention can be briefly diverted by some kind of freak wonder, thought Canov as he leaned against one of the concrete pillars on the concrete stage, but these people know it’ll eventually swing back to them.

From up on the stage he could see the signs on the storefronts above the heads of the crowd—
MICK’S SUBS, PITBULL GYM FITNESS WEAR, CANDY WORLD/MUSCLE BEACH CAFE/HOT DOGS/PIZZA
—and blocks away to the north, up by Windward, he could see the ranks of tentlike booths selling towels and sunglasses and hats and T-shirts and temporary tattoos. The direct sunlight was hot up here on the stage, though when he’d sidled over here through patches of shade he’d noticed that the breeze, bravely spicy with the smells of Polish sausage and sunblock, was nevertheless chilly. The LAPD officers ambling in pairs along the sidewalks were wearing blue shorts and T-shirts, but they’d probably been wearing sweats a lew hours ago.

Canov wished he’d had time to change before driving out here, but deLarava had told somebody on the phone that she intended to come straight here herself, and Obstadt had ordered Canov to get to Venice quickly. Now here he was, dressed for the office, and his charcoal suit and black beard probably made him look like some kind of terrorist.

A massive concrete structure on broad pillars overhung the stage on which Canov was standing, and when he’d walked up to the thing and climbed up the high steps, he’d thought it was probably supposed to abstractly represent a man bent over a barbell; and behind it, squatting between it and Ocean Front, was a big gray garage structure that was shaped like a barbell sitting on one of those machines in an automated bowling alley that returned your ball to you. To Canov it all looked like some kind of surreal fascist physical-fitness temple in an old Leni Riefenstal documentary.

He turned his attention back out to the beach. DeLarava’s film crew had begun piling their lights and microphone booms back into their van. Apparently they were about to leave—Canov stood up on tiptoes in his Gucci shoes to make sure.

W
HY THE
hell, Loretta deLarava thought as she plodded heavily away from the fish, down toward the booming surf, are so many people out on the beach? Did
he
draw them, as cover?

Her shoes had come unfastened, with sand clogging the patches of Velcro, and she couldn’t refasten them without a comfortable chair to be sitting in. And the white sun, reflecting needles off the sea and an oven glow upward from the sand, was a physical weight—she was sweating under her white linen sheath dress.

She paused and twisted around without moving her feet, blinking when the salty breeze threw a veil of her hair across her face. I should wear the rubber band on
top
of my hair, she thought. “Come here, Joey,” she called irritably.

Her bent little old assistant, ludicrous here on the beach in his boots and khaki jacket, crab-stepped away from the crowd down to where she was standing on the firmer damp sand.
He
never sweated.

“You’re on a one-way road to Hell,” he said, in a shrilly mocking imitation of a woman’s voice.
“She
knew enough,” he went on in his own voice, “to keep radio electricians around to screw. Total-immersion baptism to renounce the devils, and then she made sure to resurface under the spiderweb of radar-foxing moves. Rotor-fax devils,” he droned then, apparently caught in one of his conversational spirals, “Dover-taxed pixels, white cliffs of image too totally turned-on for any signal
to
show. Too too too, Teet and Toot, tea for two.”

DeLarava sucked on the stub of her cigarette so hard that sparks flew away down the beach, but there was no taste of ghost in the smoke. “What about Teet and Toot?
Go
on.”

Joey Webb blinked at her. “They were here once, you said.”

Perhaps he was lucid now. “Can you sense them, either of them? Can you sense
their father?”