Expiration Date (60 page)

Sullivan realized that he had been almost writhing with insulted impatience, and that he was now absolutely still. “Oh,” he said into the silence of the room. “Really?” He studied the old man’s battered, pouchy face, and with a chill realized that this
could
very well be Nicholas Bradshaw. “Jesus. Uh…how’ve you been?”

“Not so good,” said Bradshaw heavily. “I died in 1975.”

The statement rocked Sullivan, who had not even been completely convinced that the man
was
dead, and in any case had only been supposing that he’d been dead for a year or two at the most.

“
Amanita phalloides
mushrooms,” Bradshaw said, “in a salad I ate. You have bad abdominal seizures twelve…hours after you eat it. Phalloidin, one of the several poisons. In the mushrooms. And then you feel fine for a week or two. DeLarava called me during the week. Couldn’t help gloating. It was too late by then—for me to do anything.
Alpha-amanitine
already at work. So I got all my money in cash, and hid it. And then I got very drunk, on my boat. Very drunk. Tore up six telephones, ate the magnets—to keep my ghost in. And I climbed into the refrigerator.” His stressful breathing was filling the hot living room with the smell of cinnamon and old garbage. “A week later, I climbed out—dead, but still up and walking.”

Elizalde walked to the kitchen counter, put down the egg, and picked up Sullivan’s beer. After she had tipped it to her lips and drained it, she dropped the can to clang on the floor, and held out her right hand. “I’m Angelica Anthem Elizalde,” she said. “The
police
are after
my
ass.”

Shadroe shook her hand, grinning squintingly at Sullivan. “I’m gonna steal your
señori
ter, Peter,” he said, his solemnity apparently forgotten. “What are you people doing here? Hiding here? I won’t have that. You’ll lead deLarava and the police to me and my honey pie.” He was still smiling, still shaking Elizalde’s hand. “Your van is an eyesore, even under the parachute. I can’t understand people who have no pride at all.”

Sullivan blinked at the man’s random-fire style, but gathered that he was on the verge of being evicted. He tried to remember Nicky Bradshaw, who had been a sort of remote older cousin when Pete and Elizabeth had been growing up. Their father had always seemed to like Nicky, and of course had got him the Spooky part in “Ghost of a Chance.”

“Listen to me, Nicky, we’re going to try to build an apparatus; set up a séance, to talk to dead people, to ghosts,” he said quickly. “To get
specific
ones,
clearly
, not the whole jabbering crowd. I want to talk to my father, to warn him that deLarava is devoting all her resources to finding him and eating him, tomorrow, on Halloween.”

And then an idea burst into Sullivan’s head, and suddenly he thought the séance scheme might work after all.
“You
should be the one to talk to him, Nicky, to warn him—he always liked you!” Sullivan’s heart was still pounding. I might need to buy another part or two, he thought excitedly. This changes everything.

“You should talk to him yourself, Peter,” said Elizalde, who was standing beside him.

“No no,” Sullivan said eagerly, “the main thing here isn’t what I’d prefer, it’s what will work! This is a huge stroke of luck! He’ll listen to Nicky more seriously than he’d listen to me, Nicky’s twelve years older than I am. Aren’t you, Nicky? He always took you seriously.”

Bradshaw just stared at him, looking in fact a hundred years old these days. “I’d like to talk to him,” he said. “But you should be the one—to warn him. You’re his son.” “And he’s your father,” Elizalde said.

Sullivan didn’t look at her. “That’s not the
point
here,” he snapped impatiently,. “what
matters
—”

“And,” Elizalde went on, almost gently, “Nicky presumably isn’t linked to your father by a consuming guilt, the way you clearly are.”

“You’re the antenna,” agreed Kootie. “The variable capacitor that’s fused at the right frequency adjustment.”

Sullivan clenched his fists, and he could feel his face getting red. “But the machinery
won’t work
if it’s—”

For a moment no one spoke, and the only sound was a faint fizzing from one of the cans of Coke that he’d dropped when Bradshaw had knocked on the door. Sullivan’s forehead was misted with sweat.
You re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer
, he thought,
you won’t dissolve.

“You weren’t going to do it,” said Elizalde, smiling. “You were going to go through the motions, set it all up so plausibly that nobody, certainly not
yourself,
could accuse you of not having done your best. But there was going to be some factor that you were going to forget, something no one could blame you for not having thought of.”

Sullivan’s chest was hollow with dismayed wonderment. “A condensing lens,” he said softly.

“A condensing lens?” said Kootie. “Like in a movie projector, between the carbon arc and the aperture?”

Sullivan ignored him.

Without a condensing lens set up between the Langmuir gauge and the brush discharge in the carborundum bulb, the signal couldn’t possibly be picked up by the quartz filament inside the gauge.

But wouldn’t he have
thought
of that, as soon as he saw the weakness and dispersion of the flickering blue brush sparks in the bulb? Even if Elizalde hadn’t said what she had just said?

In this moment of unprepared insight, while his bones shivered with an icy chill in spite of the hot air and the sweat on his face, he was bleakly sure he would not have thought of it, or would at least have contrived to set the lens up incorrectly. He wouldn’t be able to do it wrong now, now that he was aware of the temptation. But maybe it
still
won’t work! The thought was almost a prayer.

Kootie limped forward and held his right hand up to Bradshaw. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Bradshaw,” he said. “I’m two people at the moment—one of ’em is known as Kootie—”

“That’s an I-ON-A-CO belt you got on,” said Bradshaw, shaking the boy’s hand “They don’t work. You got it from Wilshire?”

“We
were
on Wilshire,” said the boy in a surprised tone, and it occurred to Sullivan that this was the first time the voice had really sounded like a little boy’s “Right by MacArthur Park!”

“I meant H. Gaylord Wilshire himself,” said Bradshaw. “That was his original tract. From Park View to Benton, and Sixth down to Seventh. My godfather bought one of those fool belts. From him, in the twenties. What’s old man Wilshire like these days?”

“Insubstantial,” said the boy, and his voice was controlled and hard again. “But I didn’t get to introduce my other self.” He looked around at the other three people in the room. “I’m Thomas Alva Edison,” he said, “and I promise you
I
can get your ghost telephone working, even if Petey here can’t.”

Sullivan was relieved that everyone was staring at the boy now, and he went back to the refrigerator and took the second-last beer and popped it open. I shouldn’t have said
condensing lens
, he thought bitterly. I should have blinked at her in surprise, and then acted insulted.
Edison
. I’m
sure
. No doubt the kid is a ghost, or has one on him, but I’ll bet every ghost that knows anything about electricity claims to have been Thomas Edison.

“Cart all your crap to my office,” said Bradshaw wearily. “You can set up your gizmo there. It’s the most masked room in this whole masked block. Electric every which way, water running uphill and roundabout—even hologram pictures in a saltwater aquarium under black light. And bring your bag of fried chicken, Mr. Edison—Johanna loves that stuff. Did you get Original Recipe—or the new crunchy stuff?”

“Original Recipe,” said Elizalde over her shoulder as she stepped past Sullivan and opened the refrigerator.

“Good,” said Bradshaw. “That’s what she likes. I hope you brought enough.”

A
N HOUR
later Sullivan was sitting cross-legged on the dusty rug in Bradshaw’s dim office, staring idly at the featureless white glow of the old man’s TV screen and gnawing a cold chicken wing.

Bradshaw’s “honey pie,” a heavy young woman in tight leotards and a baggy wool sweater, had burst in shortly after they’d carried all the supplies to the office, and after the introductions
(Johanna, this is Thomas Edison—Mr. Edison, my honey pie Johanna)
she had told Bradshaw that “the pigs on the boat were just burping, not smoking yet.”

After that, Johanna and Elizalde had gone out again in Bradshaw’s car to buy supplies—bandages, hydrogen peroxide, a secondhand portable movie projector, a pint of tequila for Elizalde, more beer and more Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a box of sidewalk chalk, which Kootie had insisted on.

When they had got back Elizalde had cleaned the cut in Kootie’s side and secured it with the bandages and put on a more expert-looking dressing, and then they had
i
torn open the KFC bags.

The chicken was now gone, and Sullivan had had several of the beers. He tossed the chicken bone onto his newspaper place mat and took a sip of his latest beer. “Angelica,” he said, “could you pass me that muffin?” Elizalde looked at him coldly. “Why do you call it a
muffin?”
He stared back at her. “Well, it’s…a little round thing made out of dough.” “So’s your head, but I don’t call
it
a
muffin.
This is a
roll.”
She picked it up and leaned across the newspapers to hold it out. “Don’t get drunk for this,” she added. “Keep the roll,” he said. “I had my heart set on a muffin.”

“I wish
I
could get drunk,” said Bradshaw grumpily. He had crunched up a succession of red cinnamon balls as the others had passed around the chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy, and now he poured himself another glass of whatever it was that he was drinking—some red fluid that also reeked of cinnamon. “My pigs and TV are useless while Mr. Edison’s here.”

Sullivan had decided not to ask about the smoking pigs, but he waved his beer at the white-glowing television. “What’re you watching?”

“Channel Two,” said Bradshaw, “CBS, my old alma mater.”

Til bet I could mess with it and get you a better picture.” Sullivan felt tightly tensed, as if any move he made would break something in the cluttered office.

“It’s not on for the picture,” wheezed Bradshaw. “Ghosts are an electrical brouhaha in the fifty-five-megahertz range—and Channel Two is the—closest channel to that. The brightness control on that set is—turned all the way to black, right now—believe it or not.”

“That’s awfully shortwave,” commented the boy who claimed to be Edison. “You’re a shortwave critter,” Bradshaw said. “And a damn big one. Even if you were a dozen miles away—you’d still show up—on the screen here as a—white band. But standing here you’re hogging the whole show. We could have the ghost of—goddamn Godzilla standing right outside, and I wouldn’t have a clue.” “Don’t you people have a telephone to build?” asked Elizalde. Sullivan looked irritably across the newspapers at her—but then with a flush of sympathy he realized that she was as tense as he was. He remembered how she had bravely pretended to be eager to go witchcraft-shopping this morning, when he had been ready to sit holed up in the apartment all weekend; and for a moment, before he sighed and got to his feet, he felt a flicker of pitying love for her, and of disgust with himself.

“Yeah,” he said. “Household current should be enough—I bought a train-set transformer, and there’s the Ford coil.”

Elizalde had got up too, and was lifting candles and herb packets and tiny bottles of oil out of her shopping bag.

“What did you have in mind?” asked Kootie, who was sitting crouched like a bird up on the back of the old couch. “Let’s be speedy, it’s less than twelve hours to midnight, and I want to be clathrated damn deep, out of range of any magnets, when church bells are ringing the first strokes of Halloween.”

“You’re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer, you won’t dissolve! I’ll race you into the water!” It had been a man’s voice that had said it, calling happily.
Sullivan remembered the two Coke cans he had dropped on the floor back in the apartment, and he didn’t want to remember whose voice it had been that had said,
“I’ll race you into the water!”

“A bulb with a carborundum button instead of a filament,” he said loudly, “charged, with the eventual brush of electric discharge…focused through a goddamn
condensing
lens…onto the quartz filament, which we’ll blacken with soot, inside a Langmuir gauge. It’ll work like the vanes in a radiometer, wiggle in response to the light coming through the lens. We can break a thermometer to get a drop of mercury to put in the gauge, and then we can evacuate it to a good enough rarefication with a hose connected to the sink faucet….”

But the twins had been feeling nauseated ever since eating the potato salad at lunch, and were queasy even at the smell of the Coppertone lotion, and they had decided to stay out of the surf and just lie on the towels, on the solid bumpy mattress of the sand.

Kootie had been listening as Sullivan had been describing his proposed device, and he now interrupted: “You don't want a magnet in the receiver. This is such a sensitive thing you’re talking about that an actual
magnet
in the same room would draw the voices of all the ghosts in Los Angeles. We’ll have enough trouble with fields caused by the changing electrical charges. Use chalk, I had the ladies buy some.” He paused, and then said, “We still have some of the Miraculous Insecticide Chalk, Mr Edison. That won’t do, Kootie, this has to be round, like a cylinder. Good thought, though.”