Expiration Date (65 page)

K
OOTIE
’
S HEAD
seemed to be bobbing in time to a slow pulse, and Bradshaw stood up and fetched a jar from the kitchen. It was a Smucker’s orange-marmalade jar, scraped nearly empty.

“How’re you doing,” he said as he plodded back into the office with it. “Mr. Edison.” Kootie was frowning intently, and the expression made him even look like an old man, in the dim sunlight that filtered in through the lantana branches clustered outside the windows. “I’m afraid,” he said with evident care, “that I’ve stuck poor Kootie with…what I trust will be…the first hangover of his life.”

Bradshaw knew that if his flesh had still been alive, his hand would have trembled as he held out the marmalade jar. “Best thing for the boy would be,” he said. There was no heartbeat in his chest, but it should have been knocking. “For you to get sick now, while the booze is still. Undigested. Cough yourself out into this jar. The boy will feel better for it.”

“There never has been a vacuum produced in this country that approached anywhere near the vacuum which is necessary for me,” said Edison, articulating each syllable meticulously with Kootie’s mouth. “A hundred-thousandth of an atmosphere was enough to let the filament burn. I need to find my vacuum.”

“This jar is evacuated,” said Bradshaw. “Hop in. You’ve had too much to drink. Carry the hangover into the jar. To free the boy.”

“Physicists and sphinxes in majestical mists. Nothing wrong with my…sibilant syllables.” Kootie’s eyes were half closed.

“Dammit,” said Bradshaw. “Mr. Edison.
Exhale yourself. Get in the jar.”

But Kootie’s chin wobbled downward, lifted once with a questioning whine, then dropped to his chest. A hoarse snore blew out through the boy’s lips, but Bradshaw knew it was just breath, not Edison’s ghost.

“Mr. Edison,” said Bradshaw, his voice droning flatly as he tried to speak louder. “Wake up. It’s just a hop, skip, and a sigh. To bed.”

Kootie was unconscious, though, and didn’t stir even when Bradshaw reached out to nudge his head with the empty jar.

Bradshaw’s face was immobile, but a red tear ran down his gray cheek as he set the jar carefully on the cleared-off desk.

Horribly, there still was something he could do.

ARTHUR PATRICK SULLIVAN
“And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”
1898-1959

Sullivan waved a circling gnat away from his face and stared down at his father’s gravestone. He was tightly holding Elizalde’s hand.

His father’s stone had a picture attached, too; a playing-card-sized greened-brass plaque with an engraving of the old man’s face etched on it. Sullivan recognized the smiling likeness; it was from a Fox Studios publicity still taken in the forties.

The breeze paused, and when it came back it was chillier. The palm-frond swans scudded away toward the ring of fountain jets that stuck up above the surface of the water; Sullivan had at first glance thought the nozzles were a cluster of baby ducklings, and perhaps they still appeared so to the creaking frond-birds.

Sullivan released Elizalde’s hand, crouched, and touched the inset plaque—and it was loose, simply resting in the shallow rectangular recess in the stone. He pried it out with a fingernail and stood up again, tucking it into his shirt pocket and retaking hold of Elizalde’s hand.

Sullivan’s mouth was dry and tasted of pennies. When he began to speak, he found that his voice had a rusty flippancy: “So where are you, Dad?” he asked, aware that Elizalde was listening. “We want to be on the road before the evening traffic gets heavy.”

The breeze twitched at his hair, and then a small voice in his ear said.
“Call me Fishmeal.”

Sullivan didn’t move. The voice might be that of any random ghost. He seemed to remember that the line was from the beginning of
Moby Dick.

“On the freeways,”
the voice went on,
“there you feel free.”

Sullivan’s heart was suddenly beating hard enough to shake his shoulders.
That
phrase was familiar—it was something his father had always said to the twins, though the old man had only lived to see the earliest of the Southern California superhighways—the 110 to South Pasadena, and the one that he had always stubbornly gone on calling the Ramona Freeway, though it had been renamed the San Bernardino Freeway four years before he died.

Sullivan’s mouth opened, but all the things there were to say overwhelmed him, and he just exhaled a descending “Ssshhhhh.”

“You’re a good boy”
said the tiny buzzing voice,
“and I know you wont slap me, even though I
am
an insect.”

Sullivan’s hand was cold and shaking in Elizalde’s, and he guessed that she was looking at him in concern, but he held his head still.

“What kind of insect?” he whispered.

“Good, then you don’t
—” began the voice—

But it was interrupted by the wailing hyena laughter from the shadowy trees.

Elizalde’s free hand gripped his, hard. “It’s that laughing bag,” she whimpered. “The thing Kootie and I saw today—the thing that spoke on the phone.”

“Swing south,”
buzzed the voice,
“past Fairbanks to the Paramount wall, there’s a tunneling effect there, the field of the movies overlaps a bit and blurs things; then just cut north to the entrance.”

“Back the way we came;’ said Sullivan, pulling Elizalde away from the juniper bush and the stone Virgin. “But we can go around this other side of the lake.”

“What about your father?”

“He’s in my ear,” Sullivan told her. And he remembered the scene in the railway carriage in
Through the Looking-Glass
, and he added with weary certainty, “He’s a gnat.”

Elizalde obviously hadn’t understood what he had said, but let herself be hurried along up the east shore of the lake.

Trying to run smoothly so as not to jar his head and possibly dislodge his father, Sullivan nevertheless kept glancing across the lake, toward the setting sun. The figures on the far-side slope were beginning to fragment; an old woman would take a tottering step and then abruptly be a child running, and a figure on a bench would close a book and stand up and suddenly be two figures. One pedestrian became a motorcycle and rider, and silently sped away over the grass, bounding over gravestones as if they were hurdles.

Up by the Cathedral Mausoleum, Sullivan and Elizalde crossed the grass through a cluster of stones with Armenian names, each of which had an unlit candle in front of it and a dish for burning incense, and then they had sprinted across the road and were hurrying past the west side of the mausoleum, toward the stairs above the lake grave of Douglas Fairbanks.

“Scuttle fast and low through the little valley past these stairs,” Sullivan whispered, “and then when we’re among the trees—”

A sudden, shocking racket from the west slope of the Douglas Fairbanks lake made them both instantly crouch and bare their teeth—it was a loud metallic squealing drowned out by idiot laughter.

A thing was flapping toward them from the trees beyond the road to the west, about ten feet above the grass and muscling its way rapidly through the twilight air; it flexed through a slanting beam of golden sunlight, and Sullivan saw that it had long metal wings but its body was a swinging burlap bag with a baseball cap bobbing on top.

Elizalde’s razory scream seemed to shake leaves out of the overhanging willow branches, and she let go of Houdini’s plaster right hand—and it disappeared.

Sullivan’s hand was abruptly empty too; but when he glanced down he saw that he was wearing a black formal jacket with white shirt cuffs just visible at his wrists.

And then he felt the sleeves of the jacket snap loose above the elbows when the jacket and pants twisted him to his left, toward the stone stairs that led down to the lake.

“Whoa, Nellie!”
buzzed Sullivan’s father in his ear.

Elizalde too had turned toward the stairs. She was shorter suddenly, and plump, and her hair was up in a wide bun above the high collar of her lacy white blouse; but the eyes in the unfamiliar round face were Elizalde’s brown eyes, and white showed all the way around the irises.

“It’s the mask,” said Sullivan jerkily as he found himself scuffing down the stone steps toward the water. “Relax and go with it—I think we’re about to start wading.”

His unfamiliar shoes stepped right off the bottom step into the warm water, and sank to the ankles in silt; then his long shirtsleeves pulled his arms forward and he was diving.

He braced himself to land flat and not strike his knees or elbows on the bottom—but there was no bottom, and he was swimming breathlessly in choppy
cold
water. Cold
salt
water.

He gasped in sudden shock, stiff with vertigo even though he was supported by the water. He didn’t know where he was, or even if he was still conscious and not hallucinating.

The splashing of his clumsy strokes was echoed back to him by a close wall which was not the wall of the Cathedral Mausoleum but, only yards away, the vertical black steel hull of a ship too vast to be comprehended from way down here.

Someone on a deck far above cried, “Get out of town tonight!”

Sullivan could hear Elizalde splashing along next to him, but in the quickly lowering darkness he couldn’t see her. Some current kept bumping him against the steel hull of the ship and bumping Elizalde against him, even when they both swam sharply out away from it—and then he heard a metallic boom as Elizalde collided with a wall on
her
side; apparently the two of them were now swimming through some narrow channel.

And the walls were sharply concave now, curling up around him. The light was gone, and Sullivan’s knees had somehow got jammed up under his chin by the rounded metal that was now underneath him too.

He was shivering violently at the speed and force of whatever was happening—but then it stopped, and he was encapsulated underwater, in darkness.

He could feel the struggling bony pressure of Elizalde crowding hard at his back, and he knew that she was being tightly constricted by the wall on her side. They were completely submerged in solid water now, with no smallest pocket of air.

A metal floor was shoved up against Sullivan’s shoes, and the echoes of his scraping soles told him that there was a lid very close over his head. He and Eiizalde had got trapped inside some kind of closed cylinder full of water. Sullivan’s ear canals chugged and bubbled as they were icily filled, and his heart hammered at the mental image of his father lost again under seawater.

Sullivan reached out to push against the wall in front of his face, and he felt tightly ratcheted handcuffs cut into the skin of his wrists. Elizalde was thrashing furiously against his back.

With her shaking him, he couldn’t even get his legs under himself to batter his head against the lid, and he was about to lose the breath that was clenched inside his lungs by blowing it all out in a helpless scream—when he became aware that his hands were busy.

His right hand had dug in the kinky hair over his ear and pulled free something that felt like a hairpin; and his fingers now worked carefully as they straightened the bit of wire. He knew that they were working more slowly and carefully because one finger was now missing.

He managed to nudge Elizalde in the back of her ribs with his left elbow, hoping the gesture conveyed,
Hold still!

Then the fingers had deftly poked the wire into the receiver slot of the left cuff, between the close cowl and the knurled outer side of the swing arm, and, without letting go of the wire, his fingers had gripped the sides of the cuff and compressed it painfully tighter—and a moment later the swing arm had sprung back out, and his left wrist was freed. His left hand took the wire then, and, with all of its fingers to work with, freed his right wrist even more quickly.

He pushed Elizalde back and braced his feet. Now his hands thrust up past his head, scraping his elbows against the claustrophobically close metal walls, and pressed strongly upward against the metal lid—and
twisted
. The forceful torque released a catch, and then he was turning the whole lid and the upper edge of the cylinder, bracing his feet against the floor. He straightened his legs, and he was lifting the lid off of them, pushing it up with his hands, which were out in rushing cold air to the wrists—and only then did Sullivan realize that he and Elizalde had been upright rather than lying horizontally.