Expiration Date (36 page)

‘“Kay,” he managed to whisper.

Kootie watched his own hands. His left hand picked up one of the mints, and he could feel its powdery dry surface, like a big aspirin, even though he wasn’t controlling the fingers—(It’s like the opposite of when your hand’s asleep, he thought)—and his right hand brought up the plastic container to catch the mint deftly when his left hand dropped it. Then his right hand slowly scraped the edge of the container up the metal rod at the front of the cigar-lighter box, as if trying to scratch off the taped-on paper.

Then the ceiling lights brightened again and all three of the cash registers began clicking and buzzing. Edison had capped the little container as quickly as if he had caught a bee in it. “Grab a mint,” he made Kootie whisper. “Grab a whole handful, like you’re just a greedy boy.”

Kootie dizzily obeyed, and walked back to his table when his left fool began to slide in that direction. As he sat down, heavily, he heard one of the countermen demanding to know why all the registers were going through their cash-out cycles.

“Let’s go before they figure it out,” Edison said softly. “Leave a tip?” put in Kootie. “They didn’t bring it to the table,” Edison pointed out impatiently.

As he rode his scissoring legs out of the restaurant, Kootie managed to wave one shaky hand at the counterman.

T
HE NIGHT
outside was colder now, and the headlights of the faceless cars seemed to glow more hotly as they swept past. Edison, forgetful of Kootie’s hurt ankle, was making him hurry, and the result was a bobbing, prancing gait. He had stuffed the plastic container into his front jeans pocket, but his left hand still clutched the mints.

“Did
jjj
—” began Kootie, but Edison clamped his teeth shut, then said, “Don’t speak of it. I lit up the whole area—we’ve got to get clear of it.”

Kootie was hurrying west on Wilshire, away from the spot where Edison had drawn the chalk patterns on the park sidewalk by the statue, and he caught a thought
that might or might not have been his own:
A stupid use for chalk—that was just stupid—a
ghost’s
idea of a ghost trap
. Apparently the “flypaper” on the cigar lighter had been better.

Edison made Kootie glance up at a streetlight as he shuffled past under it, and Kootie understood that the old man was glad to see that the light didn’t go out to mark their passage.

Ionic
. From nowhere the word had come into Kootie’s mind, and at first he thought of marble pillars with curled scroll-like tops. (Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Doric columns had just a flat brick at the top, and Corinthian ones had lots of carved grapes and leaves.) Then the notion of pillars disappeared and he pictured a clump of little balls, with much tinier balls orbiting rapidly around the clump; when the tiny balls were stripped away, the clump—the nucleus—had a powerful electric charge. If it was moving, it threw electromagnetic waves.

These were not Kootie’s thoughts, and they didn’t feel like Edison’s either. “Ionaco,” Kootie said out loud.

And suddenly the gleam of moonlight shining on the fender of a parked car ahead of them was not just a reflection, but an angular white shape, a thing; and Kootie’s perception of
scale
was gone—the white shape seemed to be much farther away than the car.

The shape was rotating, growing against the suddenly flat backdrop of the city night, and it was…an open Greek
E
, a white spider lying sideways, a white hand with fragmenting fingers…

It was moving upward and growing larger, or closer.

It was a side-lit white face, an older man’s lace—with a white ascot knotted under the chin; and as Kootie stared, gaping and disoriented, the lines of a formal old claw hammer coat coalesced out of the shadows under the face, and an unregarded background shadow that might have been a building was now a top hat. Cars on the street were just blurs of darkness, moving past as slowly as moon shadows.

Kootie thought the image was some kind of black-and-white still projection—the light on it didn’t correspond to the direction of the moon or the nearest streetlight—until the white mouth opened and moved, and Kootie heard the words, “I only have one left.” The voice was low, and reverberated as if speaking in a room instead of out here on the street, and the lips didn’t move in synch with the sounds.

The figure still seemed to be some kind of black-and-white hologram.

Neither Kootie nor Edison had kept the boy’s body moving. Halted, Kootie was aware of sweat on his forehead chilly in the night breeze. “One what?” asked Edison wearily.

“Belt.” The ghost, for Kootie was sure that’s what this thing was, opened its coat, and Kootie saw that the figure wore, as a sort of bulky cummerbund, a belt made of bundled wire. A little flashlight bulb glowed over the buckle. “Fifty-eight dollars and fifty cents, even now.”

“We don’t need a belt,” Edison said; but, “What does it do?” asked Kootie. It was heady for the boy to realize that, on this night, he would believe nearly any answer the ghost might give.

“Well,” said the ghost in its oddly contained and unsynchronized voice, “it
could
have cured Bright’s disease and intestinal cancer. But it banishes paralysis and restores lost hair color and stops attacks of homicide. It’s called the I-ON-A-CO, like the boy said. It’s a degaussing device—you can sleep safely, if you’re wearing it.”

“I don’t have fifty-eight dollars,” Kootie said. For the first time since hurrying out of Jumbo’s whatever-it-had-been, he opened his hand. “I’ve got mints, though.”

The ghost came into clearer focus, and a tinge of color touched its white face. “Out of respect for Thomas Alva Edison,” it said, and its words matched its lip movements now, “I’ll take the mints in lieu of the money.”

“He’d rather have had the mints in any case,” said Edison grumpily. “And you never thought that
I
might want ’em.”

“Is it okay,” said Kootie before Edison could go on, “if I hold a couple out for Mr. Edison?”

“Well…a
couple
,” allowed the ghost.

Edison again took over Kootie’s tongue. “You have the advantage of me, sir. Your name was—?”

“Call me Gaylord.” Pink-tinged hands appeared in front of the coat, and the two-dimensional fingers managed to unfasten the buckle—but when the ghost tried to pull the belt from around itself, the heavy cables fell through its insubstantial flesh, and clattered on the pavement; one of the hands wobbled forward, though, palm-up, and Kootie poured the mints into the hand, which was able to hold them. Kootie was careful to hold back two of them.

Kootie’s hand slapped to his own face, and his mouth caught the pair of mints and chewed them up furiously. Then, only because it was his own mouth talking, he was able to understand the mumbled words “Pick up your damned belt and let’s go.”

Kootie crouched and took hold of the belt. The heavy metal bands of it were as cold as the night air, not warmed as if someone had been wearing it. As he straightened and swung it around his waist he noticed that it must have weighed five or six pounds, and he wondered how the ghost had managed to carry it.

When he looked around, he saw that he was alone on the sidewalk, and that the dark street with its population of rushing cars had regained its depth and noise, and no longer seemed to be a moving picture projected onto a flat screen.

Edison had swallowed the chewed-up mints. “I said let’s go.”

Kootie started forward again, trying to figure out the working of the buckle as he limped along. “This is pretty neat, actually,” he said.

“Poor doomed old things,” said his voice then, softly, and Kootie just listened. “God knows where
we are
, the
real
us. Heaven or hell, I suppose, or simply gone—in
any case, probably not even aware of these lonely scramblings and idiot ruminations back here.” Kootie’s hand had pulled the capped black plastic film canister out of his pocket, and now shook the thing beside his ear. “I wonder who this poor beggar was. I invented a telephone, once.”

Edison seemed to have paused, and Kootie put in, “I thought that was Alexander Graham Bell.”

“I wasn’t talking about that telephone.
Bell!
—all he had was Reis’s old magneto telephone, a stone-age circuit with ‘make and break’ contact interruption, good enough for tones but lousy for consonants. Showing off in front of the King of South America or somebody at the Centennial Exhibition in ’76, with his voice not hardly carrying along the wire from one end of a building to the other. He recited Hamlet’s soliloquy—’For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil…’ Two years later, with my carbon transmitter and
induction
coil, I held a loud-and-clear conversation with the Western Union boys across a hundred and seven miles, New York to Philadelphia!” Kootie snorted, to his own startlement. “‘Physicists and sphinxes in majestical mists!’ A test phrase, that was, for checking the transmission of
sibilant syllables
. Think all that was easy? And
Bell
could
hear!
He had a very soft job of it.”

Again he held the black container up to Kootie’s ear and shook it; the mint rattled inside. Then he put it back in Kootie’s pocket. “Nymph,” he said softly, apparently to the night sky, “in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered.”

Kootie’s footsteps had turned left, south down a side street, and the high reinforced windows of the buildings were dark. Up ahead on the right was a chain-link fence with some yawning lot beyond it. Kootie was rubbing his arms again in the chill, and he hoped Edison was feeling it too, and realizing that they’d need to find a safe place to sleep before long.

It occurred to him that Edison had not explained the telephone
he
had invented.

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

I
N
the glare of the streetlight at the southeast corner of Park View and Wilshire, glittering flies were darting around in the chilly air like metal shavings at a machine shop. Sherman Oaks waved them away from his face, keeping his mouth closed and breathing whistlingly through squinched nostrils, for the flies were harkening to the multitude-roar of his exhalations, and on this night of all nights he was not going to condescend to consume such trash even accidentally.

He had called the exchange back a couple of hours ago, and the router had told him that Neal Obstadt had agreed to putting up forty grand for the fugitive Parganas boy against Oaks’s pledged thousand doses of smoke.

The lady who had put up the $20,000-reward billboards had been eliminated from the exchange listings, and replaced by Obstadt.

As a receipt, the router had played for Oaks Obstadt’s authorization message:
Yeah, tell this Al Segundo or Glen Dale or whoever he is that I’ll fade him—but if he hoses me on the smokes, his own ass is smoke.

Sherman Oaks had irritably got off the phone and resumed his anxious search of the streets around Union and Wilshire—

And then about an hour ago a glance at his knife-pommel compass had shown the needle pointing west so hard that it didn’t wobble at all, and moved only to correct for his own motion.

He had immediately thrashed his imaginary left arm in a furious circle, but the only blinks of heat it felt were weak and distant and
fleeting
—human lives flickering out uselessly, in deaths that simply tossed the ghosts up to dissolve in the air. Naive psychics were impressed when occasionally they sensed this routine event, but Oaks was only interested in the coagulant ghosts that hung around and got snagged on something.

He hadn’t been able to sense the big one. It must still have been contained in the boy. But at least it was still distinct and unassimilated, and at the moment it was in its excited state, for his compass needle was pointing at it.

He had hurried west—and at Park View Street his compass had gone crazy.

Someone, almost certainly the big ghost working the boy’s hands, had drawn a lunatic ghost lure in chalk on the sidewalk, and had spat in the center of it; and now all the broken-down ghost fragments that inhabited the houseflies around the MacArthur Park lake had swarmed out and were circling the intricate chalk marks as if trying to follow some prescribed hopscotch pattern in their flight. The ones that landed on the chalk lines seemed to be dying.

The flies alone wouldn’t have hampered Oaks too badly, for their charges were very weak even in excited swarms like this; but when he stood on the Park View curb and looked down at the compass at his belt, he saw that the needle was jigging and sweeping back and forth across nearly ninety degrees of the compass face. From at least Sixth Street in the north, to Seventh in the south, the city blocks ahead were
waked up
. Every ghost in every building was agitated and clamoring. Office workers tomorrow would probably be seeing magnetically induced distortions on the screens of their computer monitors, and if they’d left their purses in their desks they’d find that their automatic teller cards were demagnetized and no longer worked. And even hours from now the offices would still be chilly with the cold spots where the ghosts had drawn up their energies.