Expiration Date

EXPIRATION DATE

Tim Powers

www.sfgateway.com

—The Associated Press,
Monday, October 26, 1992

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

W
HEN
he was little, say four or five, the living room had been as dim as a church all the time, with curtains pulled across the broad windows, and everywhere there had been the kind of big dark wooden furniture that’s got stylized leaves and grapes and claws carved into it. Now the curtains had been taken down, and through the windows Kootie could see the lawn—more gold than green in the early-evening light, and streaked with the lengthening shadows of the sycamores—and the living room was painted white now and had hardly any furniture in it besides white wood chairs and a glass-topped coffee table.

The mantel over the fireplace was white now too, but the old black bust of Dante still stood on it, the, only relic of his parents’ previous taste in furnishings. Dante Allah Hairy, he used to think its name was.

Kootie leaned out of his chair and switched on the pole lamp. Off to his left, his blue nylon knapsack was slumped against the front door, and ahead of him and above him Dante’s eyes were gleaming like black olives. Kootie hiked himself out of the chair and crossed to the fireplace.

He knew that he wasn’t allowed to touch the Dante. He had always known that, and the rule had never been a difficult one to obey. He was eleven now, and no longer imagined that the black-painted head and shoulders were just the visible top of a whole little body concealed inside the brick fireplace-front—and he realized these days that the rustlings that woke him at night were nothing more than the breeze in the boughs outside his bedroom window, and not the Dante whispering to itself all alone in the dark living room—but it was still a nasty-looking thing, with its scowling hollow-cheeked face and the way its black finish was shiny on the high spots, as if generations of people had spent a lot of time rubbing it.

Kootie reached up and touched its nose.

Nothing happened. The nose was cool and slick. Kootie put one hand under the thing’s chin and the other hand behind its head and then carefully lifted it down and set it on the white stone slab of the hearth.

He sat down cross-legged beside it and thought of Sidney Greenstreet in
The Maltese Falcon
, sweating furiously, hacking with a penknife at the black-painted statue of the falcon; Kootie had no idea what might be inside the Dante, but he thought the best way to get at it would be to simply shatter the thing. He had glimpsed the unpainted white base of the bust just now, and had seen that it was only plaster.

But breaking it would be the irrevocable step.

He had packed shirts, socks, underwear, sweatsuit, a jacket, and a baseball cap in his knapsack, and he had nearly three hundred dollars in twenties in his pocket, along with his Swiss army knife, but he wouldn’t be
committed
to running away until he broke the bust of Dante.

Broke it and took away whatever might be inside it. He hoped he’d find gold—Krugerrands, say, or those little flat blocks like dominoes.

It occurred to him, now, that even if the bust was nothing but solid plaster all through, as useless as Greenstreet’s black bird had turned out to be, he would still have to break it. The Dante was the…what, flag, emblem, totem pole of what his parents had all along been trying to make Kootie into.

With a trembling finger, he pushed the bust over backward. It clunked on the stone, staring at the ceiling now, but it didn’t break.

He exhaled, both relieved and disappointed.

Dirty mummy-stuff, he thought. Meditation, and the big tunnel with all the souls drifting toward the famous white light. His parents had lots of pictures of that. Pyramids and the Book of Thoth and reincarnation and messages from these “old soul” guys called Mahatmas.

The Mahatmas were dead but they would supposedly still come around to tell you how to be a perfect dead guy like they were. But they were coy—Kootie had never seen one at all, even after hours of sitting and trying to make his mind a blank, and even his parents only claimed to have
glimpsed
the old boys, who always apparently snuck out through the kitchen door if you tried to get a good look at them. Mostly you could tell that they’d been around only by the things they’d rearrange—books on the shelves, cups in the kitchen. If you had left a handful of change on the dresser, you’d find they’d sorted the coins and stacked them. Sometimes with the dates in order.

At about the age when his friends were figuring out that Santa Claus was a fake, Kootie had stopped believing in the Mahatmas and all the rest of it; later he’d had a shock when he learned in school that there really had been a guy named Mahatma Gandhi but a friend of his who saw the movie
Gandhi
told him that Gandhi was just a regular person, a politician in India who was skinny and bald and wore diapers all the time.

Kootie
wasn’t allowed to
see
movies…or watch TV, or even eat meat, though he often sneaked off to McDonald’s for a Big Mac, and then had to chew gum afterward to get rid of the smell.

Kootie wanted to be an astronomer when he grew up, but his parents weren’t going to let him go to college. He wasn’t sure if he’d even be allowed to go to all four years of high school. His parents told him he was a
chela
, just as they were, and that his duty in life was to…well, it was hard to say, really; to get squared away with these dead guys. Be their “new Krishnamurti”—carry their message to the world. Be prepared for when you died and found yourself in that big tunnel.

And in the meantime, no TV or movies or meat, and when he grew up he wasn’t supposed to get married or ever have sex at all—not because of AIDS, but because the Mahatmas were down on it. Well, he thought, they
would
be, wouldn’t they, being dead and probably wearing diapers and busy all the time rearranging people’s coffee ups. Shoot.

But the worst thing his parents had ever done to him they did on the day he was born—they
named
him after one of these Mahatmas, a dead guy who had to go and have the name Koot Hoomie. Growing up named Koot Hoomie Parganas, with the inevitable nickname Kootie, had been…well, he had seen a lot of fat kids or stuttering kids get teased mercilessly in school, but he always wished he could trade places with them if in exchange he could have a name like
Steve or Jim
or
Bill.

He lifted the Dante in both hands to a height of about four inches, and let it fall.
Clunk!
But it still didn’t break.

He believed his parents worshipped the thing. Sometimes after he had gone off to bed and was supposedly asleep, he had sneaked back and peeked into the living room and seen them bowing in front of it and mumbling, and at certain times of the year—Christmas, for example, and Halloween, which was only about a week away—his mother would knit little hats and collars for Dante. She always had to make them new; too, couldn’t use last year’s, though she saved all of them.

And his parents always insisted to Kootie—nervously, he thought—that the previous owner of the house had coincidentally been named Don Tay (or sometimes
Om
Tay) and that’s why the drunks or crazy people who called on the phone sometimes at night seemed to be asking to talk to the statue.