Parallelities (17 page)

On the other side of the cracked, soiled pavement rose rank upon rank of apartment houses, old homes, and condominiums of varying quality. No matter which way he turned, he recognized every detail, even to some of the cars parked on the street. The shouts of gamboling children rose from the beach, carried inland on the salt-stained breeze. Somewhere, a man was screaming at his wife. A dog barked, its presence on the beach a violation of city statute.

He was home. Or, at least, he chose to believe he was
home. Time would tell. But for now, he
needed
to believe that, needed it desperately.

Yes, he was hopefully back in his own para, with every particular and finite sight fulsomely, tiresomely familiar. The field propounded by the Boles Effect had finally faded away.

He knew that after what he had been through he ought to be glad. Glad, hell—he ought to fall down and kiss the gum-dotted, cola-splotched sidewalk. But he could not. Could not, because the last para he had visited prior to his return was what the city of Los Angeles should be. Worse, he knew it was what it could be, because in another para, it was.

Be happy within thine own world
, his inner voice admonished him,
lest you find yourself embedded forever in one that sucketh.

At least he knew his key would work. He resumed walking the last couple of blocks to his building.

A woman on the exhausted side of fifty passed him, walking her poodle. It had been to the hairdresser; she had not. Behind a palm tree, a wino slept silently on a cushion of flowering purple iceplant. Three young boys came blasting by on their skateboards, heedless of pedestrian safety. He was home, all right.

Ahead, flanking one of the main walkways that led from the beach up to the street, a pushcart vendor was hawking espresso, café latte, bagels, Danish, and hot dogs. Reaching into his pocket, an eager Max fished for his wallet. Changing worlds was somewhat more exhausting than taking off and
putting on a new pair of pants. His stomach growled again, just as it had for the elegant inhabitants of a better para. It was some time since he had last eaten, and he was borderline starving.

Other than not having a wide-brimmed hat, a broad mustachio, and perhaps an attentive trained monkey, the vendor looked like he had just finished working a Manhattan sidewalk. For the merest second Max stood paralyzed, but a quick glance revealed that the Southern California world around him was still the same. Furthermore, when the man smiled and handed him back his change, it was without a hint of New Yawk accent.

Perversely preferring his tube steak plain, Max disdained the ranked jars of colorful condiments and accepted the hot filled sandwich. Thanking the vendor, he turned to cross the street. As he raised the enbunned meat to his lips, he happened to glance down. His fingers froze.

The feverish frank was covered with tiny, glistening, millimeter-long cilia that wiggled with energetic internal animation. The casing glowed an electric hot pink. As he stared, a single tiny green eye opened in the middle of the meat, focused on him, and winked.

Gagging, he threw the abomination into the nearest trash can. Fighting to retain the contents of his stomach, he broke into a doubled-over run as he crossed the street. Behind him, the pushcart vendor stared in wonderment at the inexplicable actions of his now highly agitated customer.

Everything about his building looked familiar, even to the dog droppings in the hibiscus bushes out front. As he struggled to let himself in through the pedestrian entrance, he saw that his hand was shaking. Mentally, he found time to marvel at the phenomenon. As far back as he could remember, he had never been troubled by shaky hands.

So badly rattled, so panicked was he that he could not get the key in the lock. He had to stop and turn away from the steel door. Making a conscious effort to regulate his breathing, he stood on the concrete steps and stared out at the ocean, the sand, the cavorting, worry-free beachgoers. Children squealed with delight, L.A. ladies lay prone on the sand clad in narrow strips of brightly colored cloth as they worked silently on their melanomic tans, Frisbees and footballs soared through the faintly stained blue. The world around him looked, smelled, and tasted normal.

Maybe, just maybe, he told himself grimly, the genetically misshapen hot dog was the last of it—a final burst of broken laughter from the field. Maybe he truly was home
now
, the effect worn off, his life returned to him. Life, and a simple, normal, uncomplicated existence. Taking a deep breath, he turned back to the door. This time the key slid smoothly into the lock. The barrier opened to reveal a hallway painted dull white that blissfully smelled of nothing more exotic than concentrated pine disinfectant.

The elevator let him off on the top floor and he hurried toward the far end of the corridor as desperately as if in search
of some long-lost sibling. The door to his apartment yielded with an achingly familiar click when he turned the key. He was, perhaps at last, home.

Everything was as he had left it, except that his big TV and stereo were still gone. The burglar and his two paras had not been figments of his imagination. But everything else was unchanged, from the forlorn bachelor contents of the refrigerator to the pleasantly mussed state of his bedroom. Checking out the latter, he saw that the small portable television was still standing by his bedside. That meant the thieves had not returned in his absence to clean out what they had overlooked on their first visit.

He could go in to the office without fear of encountering the slavering minions of Cthulhu, could go knowing that the office and the rest of the city would be there, could go out to a movie or a restaurant or call up friends knowing they were his friends and not some ever so slightly altered or addlepated paras. The appalling hot dog really had been the last of it, a final flickering flash of parallel otherworldliness.

The wave of emotion that washed over him as he stood there in the dust and solitude of his own bedroom was as painfully poignant as it was unexpected. The last time he had cried, really cried, had been at the funeral of a favorite uncle who had died tragically young. That had been two years ago. Sitting down on the foot of the king-sized bed that occupied most of his bedroom, his hands in his lap, he sobbed now. Silently and steadily, his shoulders heaving occasionally, he allowed
all the emotion that had built up inside him over the past couple of days to spill out all at once. He cried until his eye sockets ached and his head hurt.

When it finally ceased, leaving him drained but sore, he got up and went into the bathroom. After making some sense of his face, he stripped down, luxuriated in the catharsis of a long hot shower, forced himself to shave and brush his teeth, prepared the coffeemaker to begin making coffee at the appointed wake-up hour, set the alarm timer on the TV, and crawled into bed.

He slept all through the rest of the day and into the night, soundly and dreamlessly, only to wake with the sun and the sound of the TV tuned to his favorite early-morning show. A glance at the clock showed that it was ten till five. Rising, he staggered into the kitchen and watched as the coffeemaker clicked on and began to burble. The nearly stale doughnut sitting alone and forlorn on a plate on the counter did not tempt him.

He found that his brain could once more focus on the minutiae of everyday life. One of those was the need to report the details of the burglary to his insurance agent. He savored the written presentation he intended to prepare. Anything that smacked of reality, even additional paperwork, was a welcome reminder that he was back where he belonged.

As he waited for the coffee to finish and contemplated what he might prepare to accompany it, he glanced at the TV. The five-o’clock news was just coming on. The morning of his
world seemed normal enough. There was the usual reporter’s grab bag of troubles and triumphs, economic and political news, weather that was worse everywhere else in the country, and soft-core human-interest stories. These last were the items that drew most of his attention, since they were the same ones he wanted to make his own business.

There was an interview with the glazed-eyed bomber of an abortion clinic in Massachusetts, whose beatific expression reflected the inner peace of the killer who knows for a certainty that he murders for God. This was followed by the story of a dog lost in Kansas who made its way back to its owner in Toledo, a report on the critically underfunded state of Long Beach city schools, an interview with a Santa Monica city bus driver retiring after an unprecedented forty-nine years cruising the same route, a couple of rapes and thefts, and lastly, a shoot-out at a popular nightspot in Venice Beach that had left a security guard, two unruly patrons, and one reporter dead. He perked up. The club was an exciting but unsavory one he had visited numerous times himself.

The channel four news anchor’s voice was an educated accusation. A fight had broken out and the security guard had tried to intervene. As for the unlucky reporter, he had made an effort to try and diffuse the situation while simultaneously interviewing both of the eventual participants in the gun battle. Drugs were rumored to have been involved. As the report wound energetically toward a conclusion, the names of
the deceased were given. Andrew Vashon, Efren Rodriguez, Dervon Crispas, Maxwell Parker …

No.

Coincidence. Too much of a coincidence, sure, but coincidence it had to be. Maddeningly, the report did not say whether the deceased Parker had been the hapless reporter, or the security guard, or one of the demised disputants. He wanted to reach into the set and grab the utterly self-possessed anchor, shake her out of her chipmunk drone, make her go back through her readout, and sift for the information he desperately needed.

It did not matter, he told himself. Coincidence it had to be. Since reality was back where it belonged, the story could not be referring to a murdered para of his. He was in his apartment, watching TV, considering what to eat for breakfast. Patently and irrevocably, he could not also be a dead man on a slab in some west-side morgue. Executing a small cliché could only confirm what he already knew. Reaching down with a hand, he pinched his leg.

And felt nothing.

He squeezed the skin again, harder—to no avail. Quietly frantic, he ran into the kitchen. The coffeemaker had finished its job and the half-full carafe awaited him, black and steaming. Reaching for the carafe, he wrapped his fingers around the handle and pulled it toward him, intending to spill some on his bare thigh. The fingers closed and pulled—but the carafe
remained on the nightstand, unmoved and undisturbed. His fingers had passed cleanly through the plastic handle.

Looking down, he saw that he was but a pale shadow of his former self. Literally. Through the pallid outline of his thighs he could see the bed, and the floor. He held his hands up in front of his face and found that he could see through them, as well.

Again he tried to lift the carafe and failed. Putting one hand around it he thought he could feel a faint warmth, but that was all. Every time he tried to move the container, his fingers slid through it as though they were composed of ashen air.

That
was
him who had been killed at the nightclub, he realized dully. According to the news report he, Maxwell Parker, was right and truly dead. Only, in this world, he was also present. He was, as one might say, a mere ghost of himself.

It was heartbreaking. Everything else since the delirious hot dog had been so familiar, so achingly normal. He was home, back in his own world for sure. But only as an echo of himself. In his current discorporeal guise he could not even contact Boles to ask for help.

There was no point in staying in the apartment. Stumbling into the den, he headed for the door. Instead of yielding to his grasp, the knob slid through his fingers. Or rather, his fingers slid through the knob. Astonished, he stared at the door where his arm had penetrated up to the wrist. Presumably the rest of his ghostly fist was present on the other side, the
fingers wriggling freely out in the hall. Experimentally, he leaned forward.

And found himself in the hallway, having passed without resistance through the solid door.

The ocean had always been his refuge, the sea his most understanding therapist. Stepping into the elevator, he tried to push the button that would take him down to the ground floor. As he did so, he found himself beginning to slip, falling slowly through the floor of the elevator. After a moment of panic, he relaxed. He was drifting, rather than plunging, down through the shaft. Not that it mattered. He was already dead anyway.

At the bottom, he climbed out and headed down the hall, striding effortlessly and painlessly through the solid steel door at the far end. Outside, the world was as orderly as the one within his apartment. The same children chased each other across the beach, the same tanned and mindless young men ran and roughhoused by the water’s edge, the same sleek women roasted themselves in the Pacific sun.

He crossed the street and the parking lot beyond. As he trudged across the beach, gliding through sand that previously would have slowed him down, he paused once to bend and study the figure of a particularly attractive woman who was sitting on a beach lounge reading a magazine of more gloss than substance. Even when he knelt near enough to kiss her, she did not move. Her only reaction came when he actually pressed his mouth to hers. Frowning slightly, she rubbed the
back of her hand several times against her lips, as if scratching a minor itch, before returning to her negligible reading. Needless to say, she did not notice his nakedness because she did not notice him at all.

Resigned at last to his anesthetized condition, he rose and continued on toward the water. What would happen if he kept going? he wondered. Surely a ghost could not drown. Would he float, or sink, and if he sank, could he walk all the way to China? Or at least, he thought, editing down an ambition unrealistic even for a ghost, to Catalina?

He paused at the edge of the foam-lipped, transparent surf. Children made ecstatic by sun and sea raced around and through him, as did serious-faced, inward-gazing joggers. Once, a Frisbee soared right through his head, causing him to flinch as it approached his eyes. There was no discomfort, no feeling whatsoever as it passed through his forehead and out the back of his expensive haircut. He was ignored by everyone, seen by no one. He was invisible, incorporeal, insubstantial. As they would have said in the South, day-ed. But not gone.