Expiration Date (53 page)

On the street in front of him this morning he was seeing Marlboro billboards with slogans in Spanish, and Nissans and the boxy new black-and-white RTD diesel buses; the Mexican teenagers at the corner were wearing untucked black T-shirts and baggy pants with the crotches at their knees, and from the open window of a passing Chevy Blazer boomed some Pearl Jam song. He was living in 1992 again—the bus trip last night had been a brief tour through long-lost snapshots, requickened memories.

Yesterday, in the minivan in the back of the truck, he had animated one of the memories that had been tumbling back into him since Monday night—a moving-picture snapshot of the old Angel’s Flight cable car that used to climb the hill from Third Street to Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles, until it was torn down for redevelopment schemes in the sixties. He had projected the hallucination to help awaken the clathrated ghost inside the boy,
excite
the ghost like an atom in a laser tube, so that Oaks would be sure of sucking the big old ghost out, along with the boy’s trivial ghost, when he would finally succeed in killing the boy. And then Edison’s ghost had countered by animating a relevant and defensive snapshot-memory of its own.

As much as it had been a shock to Oaks to realize that it was a memory they happened to have in common, it must also have been a shock to the ghost of Thomas Edison.

O
AKS HAD
gone after the world-famous inventor in late 1926—but the memory that the Edison ghost had projected had shown Oaks trying to get that ghost at a far earlier time, when Edison had been an anonymous but obviously strong-spirited boy selling snacks and papers on a train somewhere near Detroit.

Oaks thought about that now. In that surprisingly
shared
memory the boy Edison had been…twelve? Fifteen? God, that would have to have been in the early 1860s, during the Civil War! Oaks had been an
adult
…a hundred and thirty years ago!

How old
am
1? wondered Oaks bewilderedly. How long have I been
at
this?

Well, I was no more successful with damnable Edison in 1929 than I was on that train during the Civil War.

Or in the truck yesterday.

A
S SOON
as he had recovered from the loss of Houdini’s ghost, Oaks had made his way to Edison’s home in East Orange, New Jersey; and then down the coast to the “Seminole Lodge” on the Caloosahatchee River in Fort Myers, Florida, where Edison and his wife spent the winters.

Edison had been eighty years old then. He had retired from the Edison Phonograph Company only weeks earlier, leaving it in the hands of his son Charles, and was planning to devote his remaining years to the development of a hybrid of domestic goldenrod weeds that would yield latex for rubber, to break the monopoly of the British Malayan rubber forests.

The old man might as well have been
made
of rubber, for all the dent Oaks had been able to put in him during the next couple of years.

Edison had invented motion pictures, and voice-recording, and telephones, largely for their value as psychic masks, and with a transformer and an induction coil and a lightning rod with some child’s toy hung on it he could have ghosts flashing past as rapidly as the steel ducks in the Pike shooting gallery, confounding any efforts to draw a bead on the real spirit of Edison behind all the decoys.

But Oaks had managed to sneak carbon tetrachloride into the old mans coffee in the summer of 1929, and as the kidneys began to tail and the doctors speculated about diabetes, the psychic defenses had weakened too; like the van der Waals force that lets an atom’s nucleus have a faint magnetic effect when its surrounding neutralizing electrons are grossly low in energy, the old man’s exhaustion was letting his real
self
gleam through the cloud of distracting spectral bit-players and simulations.

Oaks had begun to move in—but Edison’s friend Henry Ford had moved more quickly. As an exhibit in his Ford Museum, in Dearborn Michigan, he had built a
precise duplicate of Edison’s old Menlo Park laboratory
. It couldn’t even be dismissed as a replica, for he had used actual boards and old dynamos and even
dirt
from the original. And Edison
visited
the place, and was emotionally
moved
by it, thus grievously fragmenting his psychic locus.

Ford had arranged a gala “Golden Jubilee of Light” to be celebrated on the 21st of October at the Dearborn museum. Oaks had
met
Edison—along with Ford and President Hoover!—at a railway station near Detroit, and in Edison’s honor the whole party had transferred to a restored, Civil War-vintage wood-burning locomotive.

In the instant when Oaks was poised to kill Edison and inhale the man’s ghost—and then escape somehow—a period-costumed trainboy had walked down the aisle of the railway car, carrying a basket of traveler’s items for sale. Edison, sensing
Oaks’s momentarily imminent attack, snatched the basket from the boy—and then the eighty-two-year-old inventor tottered a few steps down the aisle, weakly calling, “Candy, apples, sandwiches, newspapers!”

And so the image in Oaks’s psychic sights was fragmented in the instant of his striking; there were suddenly two Edisons in the car, or else perhaps two boys and no Edison at all. Oaks managed to keep from uselessly, blindly firing the gun in his pocket, but he was unable to restrain his long-prepared psychic inhalation.

Edison had been ready for him, too. He must have set up this replay of the remembered train scenario as a trap. The old man smashed a doctored apple against a wooden seat back and shoved the split fruit into Oaks’s face, and Oaks helplessly inhaled the confined, spoiled ghost that had been put into it.

O
AKS HAD
been…
jammed up
.

Not yet sure what had happened to him, knowing only that he had failed to get Edison, Oaks had stumbled off the antique train at Dearborn and disappeared into the crowd.

And he had discovered that he couldn’t eat ghosts anymore—and that he
needed
to. The Bony Express had begun to assail his identity inside his head, and he could feel himself fragmenting as their power increased and his own declined.

Desperately reasoning that what Edison had done, Edison could undo, he had tried to get an audience with the great man—after all, he hadn’t done anything obviously overt on the tram, and he had actually worked for a while at Edison’s Kinetoscope studio in the Bronx in the early nineteen-teens, to make pocket money and calculate countermasking techniques, while keeping up his pursuit of Houdini—but Ford and Charles Edison had kept him away, and kept Edison secluded and effectively masked.

And so Oaks had returned to Eos Angeles in despair, to commit suicide while he “still had a
sui
to
cide
,” as he had grimly told himself.

The method he chose was sentimental. He went to his stash box, a rented locker in a South Alameda warehouse in those days, and selected a choice smoke he’d been saving—and then he drew it into a hypodermic needle and injected the five cc’s of potent air into the big vein inside his left elbow.

He expected the air bubble to cause an embolism and stop his heart.

Instead, the ghost he had injected, perceiving itself to be in a host that was about to fragment into death, spontaneously combusted in idiot terror.

The detonation had blown most of the flesh off of the bones of Oaks’s arm, and the doctors at Central Receiving Hospital on Sixth Street had amputated the limb at the shoulder.

Oaks had been put in the charity ward, with drunks and bar-fight casualties,
and when he woke up after the surgery it wasn’t long before one of his wardmates expired of an infected knife wound.

And Oaks caught the ghost; ate it, assumed it, got a life. The explosion had cost him his arm, but it had also unblocked his psychic windpipe.

H
E COULD
do
that
again, any time; bottle one of the palindrome-confounded ghosts, bum a needle somewhere, and then shoot the lively ghost into his…leg, this time?
Right
arm? And then be missing two limbs. And what was to prevent the ghost from being propelled the short distance to his
heart
before it blew up?

Oaks was twitching with the urge to try once more to inhale a ghost. Maybe it would work now—now that the sun was up, now that he’d remembered all these things, now that his goddamn teeth ached so fiercely from being clenched that he couldn’t see why they didn’t crumble to rotten sand between his jawbones, which seemed intent on crashing
through
one another—maybe that’s why he was clamping them shut, because otherwise they’d stretch
apart
just as forcefully, swing all the way around and bite his head off—

No. He had proved that it didn’t work anymore, he couldn’t ingest ghosts the way he was right now. He would shoot one into a vein if he had to, before the Bony Express could crash in through the walls of his identity and make a shattered crack-webbed
crazed
imbecile of him…

But first he would see if Edison couldn’t undo what Edison could do. At least Edison was a ghost now, without the resources he’d had as a living person; and he didn’t have Henry Ford protecting him anymore.

Just some kid. Some
bleeding
kid.

Oaks sighed, flinching at the multitude of outraged and impatient voices that shook his breath. His trembling left hand wobbled to the compass-pommel of his knife, and brushed the bulk of the revolver under his untucked shirt. Three more shots in it. One for himself, if everything worked out as badly as it could and even a ghost injected right into a vein didn’t unjam him.

But I found the kid once, he thought dully. I can find him again. And I
can
make Edison tell me how to get unjammed.

And then I can eat him at last.

Oaks reached his hand into the pocket of his baggy camouflage pants and dug out his money. He had a five and three ones and about three dollars in change. Enough for bus fare south, and a can of bean soup.

Better make it two cans, he thought. Tomorrows Halloween. This might be a demanding twenty-four hours, and already I feel like shit.