Expiration Date (54 page)

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

R
UBBERS
,” said Neal Obstadt, using a pencil to push a tightly latex-sleeved vial across his desk. The roof of his penthouse office was folded back again, but the breeze out of the blue sky was chilly, and a couple of infrared space heaters had been rolled in and now glowed like giant open-walled toasters in the corners. “Why do they pack ‘em in rubbers?”

The vial was empty. All ten of the ghosts Sherman Oaks had paid as his November tithe had been compressed and sealed inside glass cartridges, along with some nitrous oxide for flavor, but Obstadt had kept one of the vials to roll around on his desk.

“The guys in the lab say they don’t,” said Canov impatiently. “They say it must be some kind of special gift wrap. Listen, I’ve got two urgent things. You said to monitor deLarava’s calls. She—”

Obstadt looked up sharply. “She’s said something? What?”

“No, nothing that seems to be important. She’s talked to that Webb guy in Venice, but he still hasn’t sensed the ghost she’s apparently got cornered there, the one that drove all those sea creatures onto the beach Wednesday morning. Mainly she’s busy setting up for her shoot on the
Queen Mary
tomorrow. But we—”

“Gift wrap,” Obstadt interrupted. “
Gift
wrap. Is it sarcasm? Disrespect? I’ve snorted nine of ’em already, and they’ve been primo, every one. A diorama of Los Angeles citizens. No complaints about the merchandise, and I’m a connoisseur. Still,
rubbers
. What do you think? Does he mean
Go fuck yourself?
Go fuck yourself
safely
?”

“
She has a telephone line we weren’t aware of
. Her listed office lines, and the phones in her stateroom on the
Queen Mary
—” Canov paused to peer nervously down at Obstadt, but Obstadt was staring at him with no expression. “She got another,” Canov blurted. “JKL-KOOT, that’s the number—”

“On those billboards. The famous Parganas kid.” Obstadt tried to think. “I’m like a cat,” he said absently, “I’ve got nine lives.”
Nine
of them he had snorted up, since yesterday afternoon! No wonder he couldn’t think—he was awash in other people’s memories, and the Los Angeles he pictured outside didn’t have freeways yet, and Truman or Eisenhower or somebody was president. “The Parganas kid! Are the cops still buying that Edison driver’s hijack story?”

“It looks like it. He’s been let go, after questioning, anyway.”

“Why does Loretta want that kid? Why did Paco Rivera want him, why
really
?” He waved his hand. “I know, his name was Sherman Oaks. A joke. We assumed it was Oaks that murdered the kid’s parents, and that he wanted to kill the kid because he could identify him; but…they both got away, right? Yesterday? Oaks and the Parganas kid?”

“Not together.”

“And
Loretta
wants the kid, too?”

After a pause, Canov shrugged. “Yes.”

Obstadt stuck his pencil into the opened vial and lifted it up. “The big smoke that hit town Monday night…” he said thoughtfully, whirling the vial around the pencil shaft. “Oaks would have been…
terribly
…aware of that. How old is the kid?”

“Eleven.”

“Not puberty yet, probably.” He was nodding. “The
kid
has got to have the
big ghost
. Either he’s carrying it, or he’s inhaled it and it’s grafted onto him, not assimilated. That’s why Loretta wants him, and why Sherman Oaks wanted him. Oaks can’t have
got
the ghost yet, or not as of yesterday afternoon, anyway, or the kid would be dead, not running around.”

Obstadt looked up from the spinning, condom-sheathed vial, and smiled at Canov. “Your guys
caught
the kid yesterday! Took him away from that yuppie couple, the dead Fussels! And you
gave
the kid to Sherman Oaks!” Obstadt was speaking in a wondering tone, still smiling, his eyes wide. “And if you had done what I told you, monitored
fucking all
of Loretta’s phone lines,
I’d
have the kid,
I’d
have the big ghost, which is probably goddamn
Einstein
or somebody, do you realize that?” Obstadt was still smiling, but it was all teeth, and he was panting and his face was red.

Almost a whisper: “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Good.” Obstadt knew that Canov must be aching to say,
But you got a thousand and ten smokes! How big can this one
be
in comparison
? You weren’t there, Obstadt thought, Canov my boy—you weren’t there Monday night, you weren’t
aware
, anyway, when that wave swept across L.A. and every streetlight dimmed in obeisance, every car radio whirled off into lunatic frequencies, and every congealed-ghost street bum fell down hollering.

“There’s another thing,” said Canov in a strangled tone. “You told me to check out any kids deLarava might have. No, she doesn’t seem to have any—but she’s looking for this Peter Sullivan, and she’s got a description of the van he’s driving, and the license
number. He used to work for her, along with a twin sister of his named Elizabeth who everybody called Sukie, who killed herself in Delaware Monday night.”

“She did? Now, why—”

“Listen! The Sullivan twins were orphans, their father was a movie producer named Arthur Patrick Sullivan, okay? He drowned
in Venice
in 1959. Now Sullivan the Elder was the godfather of this Nicky Bradshaw character—”

“Who Loretta’s also looking for, right. Spooky, in that old TV show.” “And…and Sullivan the Elder had just got married to a starlet named Kelley Keith. He drowned, while she was on the beach watching, and then she took a lot of his money and disappeared.”

“In ‘59,” said Obstadt thoughtfully. “He drowned at Venice, and now Loretta’s… after the son, and the godson, and a big-time ghost that apparently came out of the sea…in Venice.”

“And she was obviously after the daughter too, but she killed herself. Clearly you follow my thinking.”

“Okay!” Obstadt opened his desk drawer and took out the glass cartridge that contained the last of Sherman Oaks’s tithe ghosts. The lab boys had painted a blue band around it to distinguish it from the others—the vial its smoke had come in had been tucked into a different kind of condom: Trojan, while the others were all Ramses. How do the lab boys know? he wondered. Nobody should be an expert at recognizing different kinds of
rubbers.

Trojan—it reminded Obstadt of something, but Canov was speaking again.

“Loretta deLarava is almost certainly Kelley Keith,” he was saying, “and she seems to be unwilling to have that fact known.”

“Maybe she’s got crimes still outstanding,” mused Obstadt aloud, “hell, maybe she killed the old movie producer! Any number of possibilities. Whatever it is, we can use it to crowbar her, and she would be a useful employee. Meanwhile!
Tomorrow
is Halloween. Get all your men out—find the Parganas kid, and this Peter Sullivan, and Oaks, and bring ’em all to me. Alive, if that’s easily convenient, but their fresh ghosts in glass jars would be fine. Better, in a lot of ways.”

“But the Sullivan guy is masked; deLarava said so; he ditched one of her top sniffers outside of Miceli’s yesterday. And the big ghost and the kid can mask each other, and Sherman Oaks is nothing
but
a walking mask—he’s got no name or birth date, and the ghosts
inside
him probably have more personality definition than
he
does. We’d never catch their ghosts in vials, they’d be everywhere, like a flashlight beam through a kaleidoscope.”

“I don’t care,” said Obstadt, opening another drawer and lifting out the thermoslike inhaler. “I want Oaks out of the picture, by which I mean dead. He’s not just a dealer, he’s fallen into the product and become a junkie, a heavy smoker, a rival. And I want deLarava working for me, severely subservient to me.” He laid the glass cartridge into the slot at the top of the inhaler. “Do you know why water in a
bucket hollows out and climbs the walls and gets shallower when you spin the bucket real fast?”

Canov blinked. “Uh, centrifugal force.”

“No. Because there’s other
stuff around
, for it to be spinning in relation to; the room, the city, the world. If the bucket of water was the only thing in the universe, if it
was
the universe, the water would be still, and you couldn’t tell if it was spinning or not. Spinning compared to
what
? The question wouldn’t have any meaning.”

“Okay,” said Canov in a cautious tone.

“So—” So I’m tired of being hollowed out, thought Obstadt, and of climbing the walls, and of getting shallow. I’m tired of not being the only person in the universe. “So I need to
contain
them, don’t I? As long as they’re existing at all. DeLarava I can contain by just
owning
her.”

“She’s doing her shoot aboard the
Queen Mary
tomorrow,” Canov reminded him, “the Halloween thing, about ghosts on the ship. Anything about that?”

“Ummm…wait, on that. I don’t think there’s anything much on the
Queen Mary
right now. Let’s see how you do at finding these people before sundown tonight, hm?”

“Okay.” Canov visibly shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and he scratched his beard. “I’m sorry about not finding the other phone line sooner—we—”

“Get out of my sight,” said Obstadt gently, with a smile.

After Canov had tottered out the door, Obstadt leaned back in his chair and looked up into the cold blue vault of the sky, wishing that the tiny crucifix of a jet would creep across it, just to break up the monotony of it.

Then he sighed and twisted the valve on the inhaler. He heard the hiss as the pressure from the punctured cartridge filled the inside of the cylinder, and then he lifted the tube to his lips.

The hit was cold with nitrous oxide, but nausea-sweat sprang out on his forehead at the hard, static
absence
of the rotted thing that rode the rushing incoming stench and wedged itself hopelessly sideways in the breech of his mind. The back of Obstadt’s head hit the carpet as his chair went over backward, and then his knees banged against a bookcase and clattered sideways to the floor, and he was convulsing all alone on the carpet under the high blue sky.

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

A
T
eye-height on one of the glass shelves was a white bas-relief of Jesus done in reverse, with the face indented into a plaster block, the nose the deepest part—as if, Elizalde thought, Jesus had passed out face-first into a bowl of meringue. Someone had at some time reached into the hollow of the face to paint the eyes with painstaking lack of skill, and as Elizalde shuffled across the linoleum floor the head gave the illusion of being convex rather than concave, and seemed to swivel to keep the moronic eyes fixed on her.

What household out there, she asked herself nervously, is decorated to
near
perfection, lacking only this fine
objet d’art
to make it complete?

Frank Rocha's house had been full of things like that—prints of Our Lady of Guadalupe, tortured Jesuses painted luridly on black velvet
. Elizalde nervously touched the bulge of her wallet in her back pocket.

The old woman behind the counter smiled at her and said,
“Buenas días, mi hija. Cómo puedo ayudarte?”

“Quiero hacer reparaciones a un amigo muerto,”
said Elizalde. How easy it was to express the idea,
I want to make amends to a dead friend
, in Spanish!

The woman nodded understandingly, and bent to slide open the back of a display case. Elizalde set down her grocery bag and clasped her hands together to still their trembling. Already she had stopped at a tiny corner grocery store and bought eggs and Sugar Babies and a pint of Myers rum and a cheap plastic compass with stickum on the back so that it could be glued to a windshield; and in another
botánica
she had bought a selection of herbs in cellophane packets, and oils in little square bottles, that she had been assured
habría ojos abrir del polvo
, would open eyes out of the dust—all of it had been set out on the counter in response to her request for something that would call up the dead.

Out of the display arrangement of stones and garish books and cheap metal medallions, the old woman now lifted a plastic bag that contained a sprig of dried leaves:
YERBA BUENA
read the hand-lettered sticker on the bag, and Elizalde didn’t
even have to sniff it, just had to look at the dusty, alligator-bumpy leaves, to be surrounded by the remembered smell of mint; and, for the first time, she realized that the Spanish name meant
good herb
—over the generations her family had smoothed and elided the words to something that she would have spelled
yerra vuena
, which she had always taken to mean something like “fortunate error,” with the noun given an unusual feminine suffix.

“Incapácita las alarmas del humo en su apartamento,”
the woman told her—quietly, though they were alone in the shop.
“Hace un te cargado, con muchas hojas; anade algún licor, tequila o ron, y déjalo cocinar hasta que está seco, y deja las hojas cocinar hasta que están secas, y humando quemadas. Habla al humo.”

Elizalde nodded as she memorized the instructions—
disable smoke alarms in the apartment, make a strong mint tea with booze in it, then cook it dry and let the leaves smoke, and talk to the smoke.