Expiration Date

TRENTON, NJ—Thomas A. Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, whose honors have included having a New Jersey town and college named after him, received a college degree Sunday, 61 years after his death.

Thomas Edison State College conferred on its namesake a bachelor of science degree for lifetime achievement.

—The Associated Press,

Monday, October 26, 1992

CHAPTER ONE

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat; “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

WHEN 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.

TERMIMATOR 2. “Peewee’s Playhouse.” Mario Brothers and Tetris on the Nintendo. Big acs and the occasional furtive Marlboro. College, eventually, and maybe even just fnishing high school. Astronomy. Friends. All that, on the one hand.

Rajma, khatte chhole, masoor dal, moong dal, chana dal, which were all just different kinds of cooked beans. On the other hand. Along with Mahatmas, and start some kind of new theosophical order (instead of go to college), and don’t have a girlfriend.

As if he ever could.

You think it’s bad that Melvin touched you and gave you his cooties? We’ve got a Kootie in our class.

HIS JAW was clenched so tight that his teeth ached, and tears were being squeezed out of his closed eyes, but he lifted the Dante over his head with both hands—paused—and then smashed it down onto the hearth.

With a muffled crack it broke into a hundred powdery white pieces, some tumbling away onto the tan carpet.

He opened his eyes, and for several seconds while his heart pounded and he didn’t breathe, he just stared down at the scattered floury rubble. At last he let himself exhale, and he slowly stretched out his hand.

At first glance the mess seemed to consist entirely of angular lumps of plaster; but when he tremblingly brushed through the litter, he found a brick-shaped piece, about the size of two decks of cards glued together front-to-back. He picked it up—it was heavy, and its surface gave a little when he squeezed it, cracking the clinging plaster and exhaling a puff of fine white dust.

He glanced over his shoulder at the front door, and tried to imagine what his parents would do if they were to walk in right now, and see this. They might very well, he thought, go completely insane.

Hastily he started tugging at the stiffly flexible stuff that encased the object; when he got a corner unfolded and was able to see the inner surface of the covering he realized that it was some sort of patterned silk handkerchief, stiffened by the plaster.

Once he’d got the corner loose, it was easy—in two seconds he had peeled the white-crusted cloth away, and was holding up a little glass brick. The surfaces of it were rippled but gleamingly smooth, and its translucent depths were as cloudy as smoky quartz.

He held it up to the light from the window—

And the air seemed to vibrate, as if a huge gong had been struck in the sky and was ringing, and shaking the earth, with some subsonic note too profoundly low to be sensed by living ears.

ALL DAY the hot Santa Ana winds had been combing the dry grasses down the slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains, moving west like an airy tide across the miles-separated semi-desert towns of Fontana and Upland, over the San Jose Hills and into the Los Angeles basin, where they swept the smog blanket out to sea and let the inhabitants see the peaks of Mount Wilson and Mount Baldy, hallucinatorily clear against a startlingly blue sky.

Palm trees bowed and nodded over old residential streets and threw down dry fronds to bounce dustily off of parked cars; and red-brick roof tiles, loosened by the summer’s rains and sun, skittered free of ancient cement moorings, cartwheeled over rain gutters, and shattered on driveways that were, as often as not, two weathered lines of concrete with a strip of grass growing between. The steady background bump-and-hiss of the wind was punctuated by the hoarse shouts of crows trying to fly, upwind.

Downtown, in the streets around the East L.A. Interchange where the northbound 5 breaks apart into the Golden State and Santa Monica and Hollywood Freeways, the hot wind had all day long been shaking the big slow RTD buses on their shocks as they groaned along the sun-softened asphalt, and the usual reeks of diesel smoke and ozone and the faint strawberry-sweetness of garbage were today replaced with the incongruous spice of faraway sage and baked Mojave stone.

For just a moment now as the sun was setting, redly silhouetting trees and oil tanks on the western hills around Santa Monica, a higher-than-usual number of cars swerved in their freeway lanes, or jumped downtown curbs to collide with light poles or newspaper stands, or rolled forward at stoplights to clank against the bumpers of the cars ahead; and many of the homeless people in East L.A. and Florence and Inglewood cowered behind their shopping carts and shouted about Jesus or the FBI or the Devil or unfathomable personal deities; and for a few moments up on Mulholland Drive all the westbound cars drifted right and then left and then right again, as if the drivers were all rocking to the same song on the radio.

IN AN alley behind a ramshackle apartment building down in Long Beach, a fat shirtless old man shivered suddenly and dropped the handle of the battered dolly he had been angling toward an open garage, and the refrigerator he’d been carting slammed to the pavement, pinning his foot; his gasping shouts and curses brought a heavyset young woman running, and after she’d helped him hike the refrigerator off of his foot, he demanded breathlessly that she run upstairs and draw a bath for him, a cold one.

AND ON Broadway the neon signs were coming on and darkening the sky—the names of the shops were often Japanese or Korean, though the rest of the lettering was generally in Spanish—and many of the people in the hurrying crowds below glanced uneasily at the starless heavens. On the sidewalk under the marquee of the old Million Dollar Theater a man in a ragged nylon jacket and baggy camouflage pants had clenched his teeth against a scream and was now leaning against one of the old ornate lampposts.

His left arm, which had been cold all day despite the hot air that was dewing his forehead with sweat, was warm now, and, of its own volition was pointing west. With his grubby right hand he pushed back the bill of his baseball cap, and he squinted in that direction, at the close wall of the theater, as if he might be able to see through it and for miles beyond the bricks of it, out past Hollywood, toward Beverly Hills, looking for—

—An abruptly arrived thing, a new and godalmighty smoke, a switched-on beacon somewhere out toward where the sun had just set.

“Get a life,” he whispered to himself. “God, get a life!”

He pushed himself away from the pole. Walking through the crowd was awkward with his arm stuck straight out, though the people he passed didn’t give him a glance, and when he got on an RTD bus at Third Street he had to shuffle down the crowded aisle sideways.

AND FOR most of the night all the crickets were silent in the dark yards and in the hallways of empty office buildings and in the curbside grasses, as if the same quiet footstep had startled all of them.

CHAPTER TWO

“…when she next peeped out, the Fish-Footman was gone, and the other was sitting on the ground near the door, staring stupidly up into the sky.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

KOOTIE trudged back up the quiet dimness of Loma Vista Drive toward home. He was walking more slowly than he had been a few minutes ago on Sunset Boulevard, and now that he had got his breath back he realized that he was limping, and that his side hurt worse than ever. Probably that punch in the stomach had cracked a rib.

Tomorrow must be trash day—all the wheeled green plastic trash cans were out along the curbs. His neighbors’ houses, which he had always scornfully thought looked like 1950s-style Japanese restaurants, were hidden behind the trees, but he knew that behind the ARMED RESPONSE signs on the lawns they were probably all dark at this hour. He was sure that dawn couldn’t be far off.

He leaned against one of the trash cans and tried to ignore the hard pounding of his heart and the tight chill in his belly that was making his hands sweat and shake. He could claim that burglars had got in, and kidnapped him because he had seen them, because he was a witness who could identify them in a lineup; they had panicked, say, and grabbed him and fled after doing nothing more than break the Dante. Kootie had managed to escape…after a fight, which would be how come his left eye was swelling shut and his rib was perhaps broken.

He tried to believe the burglar story, which he would probably have to tell to some policeman—he tried to imagine the fictitious burglars, what they had said, what their car had looked like; and after a few moments he was horrified to realize that the tone of the whole thing just rang with kid-ingenuity, like the “concerto” he had composed on the piano a year ago, which had sounded every bit as good and dramatic as Tchaikovsky to him at the time, but later was somehow just meandering and emphatic.

A kid just couldn’t see the difference. It was like being color-blind or something; or preferring Frazetta to all those blobby old paintings of haystacks and French people in rowboats.

A grown-up would probably have been able to tell that Lumpy and Daryl weren’t nice guys. Well, shit, Koot my man, you can stay in my garage—it’s right down here, nothing fancy but it’s got a bed and a refrigerator—and you can work for me detailing cars.

It had sounded all right.

And then pow behind a Dumpster, and hard hands turning out his pockets while his knapsack was dragged off his back and all his carefully folded clothes were flung out onto the littered pavement, and a moment later Kootie was alone in the alley, snuffling and choking as quietly as he could and shoving his clothes back into the broken knapsack.

The glass brick had slid under the Dumpster, and he had had to practically get down on his face and crawl to retrieve it.

At least he could still return that. And his parents had to take him back. He didn’t care what punishment they would give him, just so that he could soon be in his own room again, in his own bed. Last night he had dreamed of going to college, of getting a “B.S.,” which in the dream had meant something besides bullshit. The dream had given him the (stupid!) determination to finally put his (stupid!) running-away scheme into actual (stupid!) action.

He hoped he never dreamed again.

He pushed away from the trash can and resumed limping up the street, from one silent pool of agitated street light to the next. Go to bed and put it off until morning, he thought miserably. They might think I’ve spent the night at Courtney’s house, and…No. There was the busted Dante to raise the alarm. Still, sneak into bed and deal with everything tomorrow morning.

The curb by his own driveway was bare—no trash cans. That wasn’t reassuring. His mom and dad must be too upset to think of taking down the cans. But maybe they were off in the car right now, looking for him, and he’d be able to—

No. As he started limping up the white cement driveway he saw their Mercedes against the lights of the kitchen. And the leaves of the peach tree to the right of the house were yellowly lit, so his bedroom light was on too.

Shit, he thought with despairing defiance. Shit shit shit, and I don’t care who knows it. At least there’s no police cars. At the moment.

He tiptoed across the grass around to the garage on the north side of the house. The laundry-room door was open, spilling light across the lawn, and he crouched up to it and peered inside.

The gleaming white metal cubes of the washer and dryer, with the colorful Wisk and Clorox 2 boxes on the shelf over them, were so achingly familiar a sight that he had to blink back tears. He stepped in and walked quietly, heel-and-toe, into the kitchen.

He could see into the living room—and there were two elegantly dressed people standing by the fireplace, a man and a woman, and only after a moment did he recognize them as his mom and dad.

His dad was wearing…a black tuxedo, with a ruffled white shirt, and his mother had on a puffy white dress with clouds of lace at the wrists and the low neckline. The two of them were just standing there, staring at different corners of the room.

In the first moment of frozen bewilderment Kootie forgot about wanting to cry. Could they have put on these crazily formal clothes just to greet him when he returned? His father’s hair was styled, obviously blow-dryered up, and…and the hair was all black now, not gray at all.

Kootie took a deep breath and stepped out onto the deep tan carpet. “Mom?” he said quietly.

His mother looked much slimmer in the dress, and he noticed with disbelief that she was actually wearing eye makeup. Her calm gaze shifted to the ceiling.

“Mom,” Kootie repeated, a little louder. He was oddly reluctant to speak in a normal tone.

His father turned toward the kitchen—and then kept turning, finally fixing his gaze on a chair by the hallway arch.

“I’m sorry,” Kootie whimpered, horrified by this grotesque punishment. “Talk to me, it fell and broke so I ran away, I’ve got the glass thing that was inside it—”

His mother raised her white-sleeved arms, and Kootie stumbled forward, sobbing now—but she was turning around, and her arms were out to the sides now as if she was doing a dance in slow motion. Kootie jerked to a stop on the carpet, abruptly very frightened.

“Stop it!” he screamed shrilly. “Don’t!”

“Fuck is that?” came a hoarse shout from down the hall.

Kootie heard something heavy fall over, and then clumping footsteps in the hall—then a homeless-looking man in a ragged nylon wind breaker was standing there scowling crazily at him. The big man’s whiskery face was round under a grimy baseball cap, and his eyes seemed tiny. He blinked in evident surprise at the slow-moving figures of Kootie’s parents, but quickly focused again on the boy.

“Kid, come here,” the man said, taking a quick step into the living room. He was reaching for Kootie with his right hand—because his left hand, his whole left arm, was gone, with just an empty sleeve folded and pinned-up there.

Kootie bolted to the left into the green-lit atrium, skidding and almost falling on the sudden smooth marble floor, and though he clearly saw the two figures who were sitting in chairs against the lattice wall he didn’t stop running; he had seen the figures vividly but he hit the backyard door with all his weight—it slammed open and he was running across the dark grass so fast that he seemed to be falling straight down from a height.

His hands and feet found the crossboards in the back fence and he was over it and tearing through ivy in darkness, getting up before he even knew he had fallen—he scrambled over a redwood fence and then was just running away full tilt down some quiet street.

His eyes must have been guiding his feet on automatic pilot, for he didn’t fall; but in his head all he could see was the two figures sitting in the chairs in the atrium, duct-taped into the chairs at neck and wrist and ankle—his overweight mother and his gray-haired father, mouths gaping and toothless, eyes just empty blood-streaked sockets, hands clawed and clutching the chair arms in obvious death.

CHAPTER THREE

“…Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.”

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice.

“I only wish I had such eyes,” the. King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!”

—Lewis Carroll,

Through the Looking-Glass

PETE Sullivan opened his eyes after the flash, but seconds went by as he watched a patch of sky through the screened window of the van, and he didn’t hear any thunder. He sat up in the narrow bed and wondered whether silent flashes behind one’s eyes were a symptom of impending stroke; he had been unaccountably jumpy tonight, and he had played a terrible game of pool in the bar here after work, flinching and clumsy with the cue stick.

The thought of incipient stroke wasn’t alarming him, and he realized that he didn’t really believe it. He swung his bare feet to the carpeted floorboards and stood up—years ago he had replaced the van’s stock roof with a camper top that raised the ceiling two and a half feet, so he was able to stand without bumping the top of his head—and he leaned on the little sink counter and stared out through the open window at the Arizona night.

Tonto Basin was down inside a ring of towering cumulus clouds tonight, and as he watched, one of the clouds was lit for an instant from inside; and a moment later a vivid fork of lightning flashed to the east, over the southern peaks of the Mogollon Rim.

Sullivan waited, but no thunder followed.

The breeze through the screen smelled like the autumn evenings of his boyhood in California, a cool smell of rain-wet rocks, and suddenly the stale old-clothes and propane-refrigerator air inside the van was confining by contrast—he pulled on a pair of jeans and some socks, stepped into his steel-toed black shoes, and slid the door open.

When he was outside and standing on the gravel of O’Hara’s back parking lot, he could hear the noise from the bar’s open back door—Garth Brooks on the jukebox and the click of pool shots and the shaking racket of drink and talk.

He had taken a couple of steps out across the lot, looking up vainly for stars in the cloudy night sky, when a Honda station wagon spoke to him.

“Warning”, it said. The bar’s bright back-door light gleamed on the car’s hood. “You are too close to the vehicle-step back.” Sullivan stepped back. “Thank you”, said the car.

The thing’s voice had been just barely civil.

Sullivan plodded back to the van for cigarettes and a lighter. When he was back out on the gravel, the Honda was quiet until he clicked his lighter; then the car again warned him that he was too close to the vehicle.

He inhaled on the cigarette and blew out a plume of smoke that trailed away on the breeze. “Too close for what?” he asked.

“Step back,” said the car.

“What vehicle?” Sullivan asked. “You? Or is there somebody else around? Maybe we both ought to step back:”

“Warning,” the thing was saying, speaking over him. “You are too close to the vehicle. Step back.”

“What’ll you do if I don’t?”

“It’ll go off like a fire siren, Pete,” came a voice from behind Sullivan. “What are you teasing a car for?”

It was Morrie the bartender, and out here in the fresh air Sullivan thought he could smell the beer stains on the man’s apron. “He started it, Morrie.”

“It started it. It’s a car. You’ve got a call.”

Sullivan imagined picking up the bar phone and hearing the flat mechanical voice telling him that he was standing too close to a vehicle. “The power station?”

“Didn’t say. Maybe it’s some local dad pissed about his daughter being messed with.”

Morrie had turned and was crunching back toward the lit doorway, and Sullivan tucked in his T-shirt and followed him. It wouldn’t be some citizen of this little desert town—Sullivan was one of the apparently few tramp electricians who didn’t get drunk every night and use his eight-hundred-a-week paycheck to sway the local girls.

Besides, he’d only been in town this season for a week. Last Friday he’d been bending conduit pipe and pulling wires at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station a hundred miles west of here—and during this last week at the Roosevelt Station, outside of town, there had been too much overtime for him to do anything more than work, come back here to gulp a couple of Cokes and shoot a couple of games of pool, and sleep.

The noise of conversation increased when he walked in through the back door after Morrie, and Sullivan squinted in the sudden glare of overhead lights and neon beer signs. He walked to the bar, and Morrie was already behind it and tilting a plastic cup under the Coke tap. The telephone was on the bar with the receiver lying beside it.

Sullivan picked it up. “Hello.”

“Pete? God, you’re a creature of habit—every year working the same places at the same seasons.” She sounded angry.

It was his twin sister, and his hand tightened on the receiver. “Sukie, what—”

“Shut up and listen. I’m at a hotel in Delaware, and the front desk just called me. They say somebody hit my car in the lot, and they want me to go down and give ’em insurance information. I—”

“Sukie, I don’t—”

“Shut up! I woke up on bar-time, Pete! I was bolt upright a second before the phone rang, and then I felt the plastic of the receiver before my hand hit it! I could feel my pupils tighten up a second before I turned on the lamp! Nobody hit my car, I’ll bet my life on it! She’s found me, and she’ll find you—she’ll have people at the desk here waiting for me, and she’s got people out there where you are, you know she does. And you know what she wants us for, too, unless you’ve managed to forget everything. I’m looking Commander Hold-’Em in the eye right now, if you care; this is for you. Go straight out of there, right now, and drive and—this call is through the goddamn front desk, I know they’re listening—go to the place where we hid—a thing, some things, okay? In a garage? It’s what you’re gonna need if she’s—wanting us again. For any purpose.”

“I can’t—”

“Do you know the thing I’m talking about?”

“I think so, the…where you can’t hardly walk for all the palm fronds on the pavement, right? And you’ve got to crawl under low branches? Is the…thing still there?”

“I’ve never moved it.”

“But I can’t just walk away here, Sukie, I’d have to…God, go to Radiation Control and get a Whole Body Count, that takes twenty minutes right there, and for my paycheck—”

“Walk away, Pete! It’s just a job.”

“It’s the Arizona Public Service,” Sullivan told her evenly, “that's Edison-owned, just like all the utilities are—the east coast is all Con Ed, and the West Coast is California Edison, and even Niagara up there is on the Edison grid. It’s all Edison, coast to coast. I’d never work for any of the utilities again.”

“A.O.R, dude.”

“Sukie, maybe somebody did hit your car,” he began, then realized that he was talking to a dead phone. He hung it up and pushed it toward Morrie.

“Sukie?” the bartender said.

“My sister. Somebody ran into her car and she wants to make a federal case out of it.” Sullivan was remembering how awkwardly he’d played pool earlier in the evening, and he was annoyed to notice that his hands were trembling. He pushed away the Coke. “Give me a shot of Wild Turkey and a Coors chaser, would you?”

Morrie raised his eyebrows, but hiked up the bottle of bourbon without remarking on the fact that this would be the first real drink Sullivan had ever ordered in the place.

Sullivan sat down at one of the stools and slugged back the bourbon and then chased it with a long sip of cold beer. It made him feel closer to his sister, and he resented that almost enough to push the drinks away.

But not quite. He waved the emptied shot glass at Morrie and had another sip of the beer.

I’m looking Commander Hold-’Em in the eye right now, if you care.

Commander Hold-’Em was Sukie’s name for the Grim Reaper—Sullivan believed she’d derived it from the name of some poker game that she always lost at—and it was also what she had always called whatever gun she carried. For several years, in the old days in L.A., it had been a .45 Derringer with two hollow-point bullets in it. Commander Hold-’Em would certainly still be something as effective today. Sullivan wondered if she would kill herself before even going down to the front desk and making sure that the call had been a trap. Maybe she would. Maybe she had just been waiting, all these years, for a good enough excuse to blow her goddamned head off. And of course not neglect to call him first.

And you know what she wants us for, too, unless you’ve managed to forget everything.

For a moment Sullivan found himself remembering an enigmatic image from his recurrent adolescent nightmare: three cans of Hires Root Beer, sitting in beach sand, unopened forever…a man’s voice saying, You’re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer—

And he shuddered and thrust the thought away. He lifted his glass and took such a huge slug of beer that his throat ached sharply, and he had to sit rigid until the swallow had finally gone down. At last he could breathe again.

Now he could feel the sudden cold of the beer in his stomach. At least it had driven away the momentary memory. God, he thought, I’m turning into Sukie.

A.O.P, dude.

She’d been good at driving the L.A. freeways drunk—she always said that if you started to weave in your lane, you could cover it by accelerating as you corrected, and nobody would know you’d been out of control; it had become a motto of theirs—Accelerate Outta Problems.

Morrie finally refilled the shot glass; Sullivan nodded and took a cautious sip. I was never any good at shooting pool, he thought. Or else I’ve always been fairly good at it, but I was just jumpy when I was playing earlier tonight. I can’t accelerate out of this town, out of this job. Probably she made the whole thing up—giggling in a house somewhere right now, not in Delaware and not even owning a gun anymore—just to wreck my life one more time.

No way it’ll happen.

He took a moderate swallow of the beer. I could just resign from this job, he thought. If I turn in my resignation to the general foreman, it won’t be held against me. Tramp electricians are always getting “a case of red-ass” and moving on. I’d just have to sign out, and get a Whole Body Count, wearing paper pyjamas and lying in the aluminum coffin while the counter box inches over me, measuring the rems of radiation I’ve picked up this year; then drive to California and retrieve the…the mask, and move on, to Nevada or somewhere. There’s always utilities work for someone who’s still in good with Edison.

But if Sukie’s just jerking me around, why should I bother?

And if she’s not, he thought, then there’ll be people waiting for me to show up at the station, as she said. In fact, if bad guys were listening in on our call, at the front desk of her hypothetical hotel, then they’d have heard Morrie answer the phone here the way he always does, O’Hara’s in Roosevelt, Morrie speaking.

It’s a half-hour’s drive from the Roosevelt Nuclear Generating Station to O’Hara’s…if you’re not to a tearing hurry.

Sullivan bolted the rest of the bourbon and the beer and walked out of the bar. Morrie would add the cost of the drinks to the rent on the parking space in the back lot.

As he trudged across the obliquely lit gravel, the sight of the familiar, homely old van slowed his pace. He could just climb in, pull the doors shut behind him and lock them and get back into the fold-out bed, and tomorrow morning at eight be driving through the gate at the Roosevelt Station, waving his badge at the guard who knew him anyway, and then happily spend all morning tightening conduit bolts that would have to be ripped out and done again after the foreman noticed that the inspection date on all the torque wrenches had expired a week ago. Assured, meaningless, union work, at thirty dollars an hour. Where would he find another trade like it?

He jumped in surprise, and an instant later the Honda said “Warning—you are too close to the vehicle”. The breeze was suddenly cold on his forehead, and his heart was pounding. “Step back,” the thing went on. He stepped back. “Thank you.”

Bar-time. It had not just been clumsiness at the pool table. He was definitely on bar-time again.

I woke up on bar-time, Pete!

That’s what the Sullivan twins had called the phenomenon when they’d first noticed it, early in their years of working for Loretta deLarava in L.A.—Sukie had got the term from California bars that keep their clocks set about ten minutes fast, so as to be able to get all the drinks off the tables by the legal shut-down time of 2 A.M., and drinkers experience 2 A.M. a little while before it actually occurs. The twins had spent a lot of nights in bars, though Pete drank only Cokes and the occasional beer, and he could still vividly see Sukie, wearing dark glasses at some dark corner table, sucking a cigarette and asking someone, One-thirty? Is that real time or bar-time?

Sullivan stood beside the van now, his hand on the driver’s-side door handle.

Finally he unlocked the door and climbed in. The engine started at the first twist of the key, and Sullivan let it warm up for only a few seconds before clanking the van into gear and steering it out toward the road that would take him south to Claypool and the 60 Highway that stretched away west.

The sky flashed again, twice; and though he had rolled the window down as he drove past the glaringly lit front entrance of O’Hara’s and then picked up speed on the paved road, he still heard no following thunder.

He touched the brake pedal an instant before the brake lights of the car ahead came on; and then he saw the next jagged spear of lightning clearly because he had already glanced toward where it would be.

Bar-time for sure. He sighed and kept driving.

Everyone experiences bar-time occasionally, usually in the half-conscious hypnagogic stage of drifting into or out of sleep—when the noise that jolts one awake, whether it’s an alarm or a bell or a shout, is anticipated, is led up to by the plot of the interrupted dream; or when some background noise like the hum of a refrigerator compressor or an air conditioner becomes intrusive only in the instant before it shuts off.

The Sullivan twins had spent countless hours on bar-time during the eighties—it had seemed that they were always reaching for a telephone just before it would start to ring, and appearing in indoor snapshots with their eyes closed because they had anticipated the flash. Eventually they had figured out that it was just one more weird consequence of working for Loretta deLarava, but the pay had been good enough to make it, too, just a minor annoyance.

Pay. Sullivan glanced at his fuel gauge and wondered if he would ever be able to get his last paycheck from the power station. Probably not, if Sukie had been right about deLarava being after them. Could he get a job as a lighting technician again?

Probably not, if deLarava was still in any aspect of the film business.

Great.

Worry about it all later, he told himself, after you’ve got to Hollywood and fetched the mask—if it’s still in that weird garage, if somebody hasn’t planed off that hill and put up condominiums there.

Without taking his eyes from the highway rushing past in his headlights, he fumbled in the broad tray on the console beside him found a tape cassette, and slid it into the dashboard slot; and as the adventurous first notes of Men At Work’s ‘A Land Down Under” came shaking out of the speakers behind him, he tried to feel braced and confident. The intrepid traveler, he thought, the self-reliant nomad; movin’ on, able to handle anything from a blown head gasket to a drunk with a knife in a roadside bar; and always squinting off at the horizon like the Marlboro man.

But he shivered and gripped the wheel with both hands. All the way out to Hollywood? The oil in the van hadn’t been changed for four thousand miles, and the brakes needed bleeding.

Sukie had frequently, and apparently helplessly, made up nonsense lyrics for songs, and when the tape ended he found himself humming the old “Beverly Hillbillies” tune, and unreeling random lyrics in his mind:

Sister said; “Pete, run away from there.”

She said, “California is the place you ought to be,”

So he cranked the poor old van, and he drove to Galilee.

On the night of his sixteenth birthday he had borrowed his foster-father’s car and gone tearing around a dark shopping-center parking lot, and then the security guards had chased him for miles in their fake cop car, and at the end of the chase the furious guards had threatened to charge him with all kinds of crimes; nothing had come of it, and the only one of the wild charges he could remember now was Intercity flight to avoid apprehension.

And now here he was, twenty-four years later, his black hair streaked with gray at the temples, forlornly wondering how even an interstate flight could possibly let him avoid apprehension.

In the rearview mirror he saw the back window flash white, and this time thunder came rolling and booming across the desert, past him and on ahead into the darkness, followed a moment later by thrashing rain.

He switched on the windshield wipers. Her real name had been Elizabeth, but she’d somehow got her nickname from Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife”—the song had briefly referred to a woman named Sukie Tawdry. His vision blurred with tears and he found that he was weeping, harshly and resentfully, for the twin sister who had been lost to him long before tonight.

The unfamiliar liberation of drink made him want to stomp on the accelerator—A.O.P., dude—and hammer the flat front of the van relentlessly through the desert air; but he remembered that this first rain would free up oil on the surface of the highway, slicking everything, and he let the speedometer needle drift back down to forty.

There was, after all, no hurry. DeLarava would want to do her work on Halloween, and that was still five days off.

CHAPTER FOUR

It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not”…

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

LUMPY and Daryl had not found Kootie’s bag of quarters in the knapsack’s side pocket, and in an all-night drugstore farther up Fairfax he had bought a cheap pair of sunglasses to conceal his swelling discolored eye. That left a little more than six dollars.

Kootie was sitting on a bus bench now, just because he had been too tired to walk one more block. Maybe it didn’t matter—maybe all the bus benches in the whole city looked like this one; or, worse, appeared normal to normal people but would all look like this to him.

The bench was black, with a big white skull and crossbones painted on it, along with the words DON’T SMOKE DEATH CIGARETTES.

And he had seen packs of these Death cigarettes at the drugstore. The packs were black, with the same skull and crossbones for a logo. Could that actually be a brand name? What could possibly be in the packs? Little white lengths of finger bones, he thought, stained with dried blood at one end to show you where the filter is.

He was shivering in his heavy flannel shirt. The sunlight was warm enough when it was shining on him, but in the shade like this the air was still nighttime air—chilly, and thin enough to get in between the teeth of a zipper. Maybe when the sun got up over the tops of the storefront buildings this strange night would finally be all the way gone and the bus bench would be stenciled with some normal colorful ad.

Maybe he could go home, and his mom and dad would be there.

(in their wedding clothes, those two had to have been his real mom and dad, not the bodies duct-taped into the chairs in the atrium, the bodies with their eyes—)

He was shaking now, and he leaned back, gripping his elbows tightly, and forced the shuddering breaths into his lungs and back out. Perhaps he was having a heart attack. That would probably be the best thing that could happen. He wished his feet could reach the ground so that he could brace them on the pavement.

Back up on Sunset, hours ago when the sky had still been middle-of-the-night dark, he had tried several times to call the police. Maybe in the daytime he’d be able to find a telephone that worked right. Maybe maybe maybe.

The shivering had stopped, and he cautiously took a deep breath as if probing to see if a fit of hiccups had finally gone away. When he exhaled, he relaxed, and he discovered that his toes could reach the pavement.

He brushed back his black curly hair and stood up; and when he had walked several yards to be able to stand in a patch of sunlight he discovered that he was hungry. He could afford breakfast, but probably not much after that.

“You waiting for the 217 bus, kid?”

Kootie glanced up at the old man who had spoken to him. “No,” he said quickly. “No, I’m…walking to school today.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and hurried on south down the Fairfax sidewalk, forcing himself not to glance fearfully back over his shoulder.

That guy looked normal Kootie told himself. He might have been just a man on his way to work, curious about this kid out by himself at dawn here.

But Kootie remembered some of the people he’d met during this long, alarming night. An old woman pushing a shopping cart across a bright-lit supermarket parking lot had shouted to him, calling him Al, and when he had hurried away from her she had started crying; her echoing sobs had been much louder than her shouting, and he’d still been able to hear her when he was a block away. Later, ducking away from an old man that had seemed to be following him, he had interrupted a young bum, his pants down around his ankles, defecating behind some trash cans…and Kootie shook his head now to drive away the memory of seeing rocks and bottlecaps falling out of the embarrassed guys butt and clattering on the asphalt. And one woman had pulled up to the curb in a gleaming XKE Jaguar and rolled down the passenger-side window and called out to him, “You’re too young to smoke! I’ll give you a hundred dollars for your cigar!” That time he’d started crying, because even though he couldn’t understand what she’d meant, he had wanted to run to the nice car and beg the pretty lady for help, but her eyes and lips and teeth had been so glitteringly bright that he could only hurry away, down an alley too clogged with trash cans and stacks of wooden pallets for her car to follow.

Behind him now he heard the familiar puff of air brakes and the roar of a bus engine, and a moment later the big black-and-white RTD bus had gone grinding and sighing past on his left. Kootie distantly hoped that the old man had got aboard, and was going to some job that he liked, and that to him this city was still the malls-and-movie-billboards place Kootie remembered living in.

He watched the bus move ponderously through the lanes of morning traffic—what was down in that direction? The Farmer’s Market, Kootie recalled, and that Jewish delicatessen where a big friendly man behind the fish counter had once given him samples of smoked whitefish and salmon—and Kootie saw a police car turn north from Beverly.

There was a pair of pay telephones in front of a minimart ahead of him, and he slanted his pace to the right, toward them, walking just fast enough so that he could be standing there holding a receiver to his ear when the police car would be driving past at his back. When he got to the phone he even went so far as to drop one of his precious quarters into the slot. I need time to think, he told himself.

He was imagining waving down the police car, or the next one that came by. He would let himself just hang on to the door handle and cry, and tell the officers everything, and they would all go back to Kootie’s house on Loma Vista Drive. He would wait in the car with one of the cops while the man’s partner checked out the house. Or else they’d radio for another car to go to the house, and they’d take Kootie “downtown.”

And then what? Several times during his long night’s trek he had paused to close his eyes and try to believe that his parents weren’t dead, that he had just hallucinated all that terrible stuff about them being dressed up for a wedding in the living room and at the same time sitting murdered in the atrium, and about the one-armed hobo rushing up the hall and trying to grab him; and he had tried to believe too that the glass brick in his shirt pocket had nothing to do with the people he was encountering; and he hadn’t once been able to believe either thing.

Could he believe them now, now that the sun had cleared the rooftops of the shop buildings across the street and all these distracted, ordinary strangers were busily going to work?

He could do an easy test. With a trembling finger he punched the 9 button once and the 1 button twice. I can still change my mind, he told himself nervously. I can still just run away from this phone—jeez, walk, even.

There was a click in the earpiece, and then a man’s blurry voice: “…and I told him to just go fuck himself. What do you think of that? I don’ gotta…” The voice faded, and Kootie was listening to the background murmur—laughter, mumbling, glasses clinking, someone singing. He could just barely hear a child’s voice reciting, over and over again, “In most gardens they make the beds too soft—so that the flowers are always asleep.”

Kootie’s chest was empty and cold. “Hello,” he said, in a voice that might have been too loud because he had to talk over the sudden ringing in his ears, “hello, I was trying to get the emergency police number—” It could still be all right, he thought tensely, all the L.A.-area phones could be crossed-up in this way—but even just in his head, just unspoken, the thought had a shrilly frightened tone. “Who have I reached, please?”

For a moment there was just the distant clatter and slurred speech, and then a woman’s voice, choking and thick, wailed, “Al? Al, thank God, where are you gonna meet me tonight? That supermarket parking lot again? Al, my legs’ve swelled up like sausages, and I need—”

Kootie hung up the phone without dropping it, and he was able a moment later to walk easily away down the Fairfax sidewalk; but he was surprised that the air wasn’t coagulating into the invisible molasses that, in nightmares, kept him from being able to drag one foot ahead of the other.

It was all real. The sun was up, and he was wide awake, and that voice on the phone had been the voice of the old crazy woman he’d run away from in the parking lot, hours ago. His parents really were dead, obviously killed because he had broken the Dante and taken away the glass brick.

Kootie had killed them.

And even though the police wouldn’t ever believe that, they would make Kootie do things—like what? Identify the bodies? No, they wouldn’t force a kid to do that, would they? But he’d still have to make probably a million statements, which would either be true and sound crazy, or be lies and sound like a kid’s lies; and eventually he’d be put into a foster home somewhere. And how would the telephones behave there? What sort of person would be in charge of the place, or soon come visiting? And if by then they’d decided he was crazy, they might have him in restraints, strapped down on his bed.

He recoiled away from a memory of duct tape.

If he just got rid of the glass brick, would all this stuff stop happening? But who would eventually find it, and why had his parents kept it hidden?

He remembered a Robert Louis Stevenson story about a devil in a bottle—it could get you anything you wanted, but if you died owning it you’d go to hell—and if you wanted to get rid of it you had to sell it for less than you’d paid for it, or it would come back to you even if you threw it into the ocean.

Was this thing worth money, could he sell it? Was it a “cigar”? If so, he could have got a hundred dollars for it from the Jaguar woman last night. It seemed to him that a hundred dollars was a good deal less than what he had paid for it.

There was a low, white-painted cinder-block wall around the little parking lot of a strip shopping center ahead of him, and he crossed to it and hiked himself up to sit on the coping. He glanced around at the wide, busy intersection and the sidewalks to make sure no one was paying any particular attention to him and then he unbuttoned the pocket of his heavy flannel shirt and lifted out the glass brick. It seemed to click, very faintly deep inside, when he turned it in his hand.

This was the first time he’d looked at it in sunlight. It was rectangular, but bumpy and wavy on its surfaces, and even when he held it up to the sun he couldn’t see anything in its cloudy depths. He ran a finger around its narrow side—and felt a seam. He peered at the side surfaces and saw that a tiny straight crack went all the way around, dividing the brick into two equal halves.

The two guys that had robbed him so long ago last night had taken his Swiss army knife, so he worked a fingernail into the groove and twisted, and only managed to tear off a strip of his nail. By holding the glass thing between his palms, though, with his fingers gripped tightly over the edges, he was able to pry hard enough to feel the two glass sections move against each other, and to be sure that the thing could be opened.

He pressed it firmly together again and took off his backpack to tuck the brick safely down among his tumbled clothes. He pulled the flap down over it all and then, since the plastic buckles had been broken last night, carefully tied the straps tight before putting the backpack on again. Maybe people wouldn’t be able to sense the glass thing so easily now.

Like a gun, he thought dully, or a grenade or blasting caps or something. It’s like they had a gun in the house and never told their kid even what a gun is. It’s their own fault I somehow accidentally got them killed by playing with it.

If I open it—what? A devil might come out. A devil might actually come out. It wouldn’t matter whether or not I believe in devils, or that my friends and the teachers in school don’t. People in 1900 didn’t think that radium could hurt you, just carrying a chip of it in your pocket like a lucky rock, and then one day their legs fell off and they died of cancer. Not believing something is no help if you turn out to be wrong.

He heard the short byoop of a motorcycle cop’s siren and looked up nervously—but the cop was stopping way out in the intersection, and, as Kootie watched, he climbed off the blue-flashing bike and put down the kickstand and began directing traffic with broad slow gestures. The traffic signals had gone completely out sometime during the last few minutes, weren’t even flashing red; and then even when the policeman waved for the southbound lanes to move forward, the cars and trucks and buses stayed backed up for another several minutes because nearly every driver had stalled and had to start up again.

As Kootie crossed Beverly, the sound of grinding starter motors was echoing among the lanes behind him like power saws.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Then you keep moving around, I suppose?” said Alice.

“Exactly so,” said the Hatter: “as the things get used up.”

“But what happens when you come to the beginning again?” Alice ventured to ash.

“Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare interrupted…

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

ONE of them had finally been for real.

It had been two hours since the Greyhound bus had pulled out of the dawn-streaked yard of the Albuquerque station, subsequently finding the 1-40 highway and cranking its way up through the dry rock Zuni Mountains, downshifting to follow the twisting highway among the ancient lava beds, and booming down the western slope to roar right through Gallup without stopping; but when the bus finally swung off the 1-40 at the little town of Houck, just over the border into Arizona, Angelica Anthem Elizalde simply kept her seat while most of the other passengers shuffled past her down the aisle to catch some fresh morning air and maybe a quick cup of coffee during the fifteen-minute stop.

She looked out her window. Though it was now eight-thirty, the, bus was still casting a yards-long shadow, and the shadow pointed west. She shivered, but tucked her ladies’ magazine into the pocket of the seat in front of her.

She had hoped to distract herself with its colorful pages, but had run aground on an almost hysterically cheerful article about how to cook squash, with a sidebar that addressed “Twelve Important Squash Questions”; and then she had been forced out of the pages again by a multiple-choice “Creativity Test,” which gave high marks to the hypothetical housewife who, confronted with two mismatched socks after all the laundry had been put away, elected to (C) make hand puppets of them rather than (A) throw them away or (B) use them for dusting.

None of the listed answers had been anything like “burn them,” “eat them,” “bury them in the backyard,” or “save them in case one night you answer the door to a stranger with bare, mismatched feet.”

Elizalde managed a tight smile. She flexed her hands and wondered what work she would find to do in Los Angeles. Typist, again? Waitress, again? Panhandler, bag lady, prostitute, a patient in one of the county mental hospitals in which she’d done her residency—

—a felon locked up in the Sybil Brand Institute for Women—

She quickly fetched up the magazine out of the seat pocket and stared hard at a photograph of some happy family having fun around a swing set (—probably all of them models, really, who had never seen each other before lining up there for the picture—) and she thought again about turning back. Get off the bus at Flagstaff, she told herself, and catch the 474 bus, take it all the way back to Oklahoma City, be there by eight-thirty tonight. Go back to the big truck stop under the Petro water tower, tell the manager at the Iron Skillet that you were too sick to call in sick when you failed to show up for the waitress shift last night.

Get back on that old heartland merry-go-round.

For nearly two years she had been traveling, far from Los Angeles, working in restaurants and bars and small offices, along the Erie Canal from the Appalachians to Buffalo, and up and down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cairo, and, most recently, along the Canadian River in Oklahoma. She’d celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday with half a dozen of the Iron Skillet waitresses in the bar at O’Connell’s in Norman, twenty minutes south of Oklahoma City.

At least L.A. would be fairly warm even now, in October, four days before Halloween. The Mexican street vendors in the Boyle Heights area might already be selling El Dia de los Muertos candy, the white stylized skulls and skeletons—

(—Shut up!—)

Again she forced herself to stare at the family in the magazine photo, and she tried to believe that it really was a family, that they were genuinely enjoying some—

(—long-lost—)

(—Shut up!—)

weekend in the backyard, oblivious of this photographer—

…It didn’t work. The adults and kids in the photograph just looked like models, strangers to each other.

Elizalde remembered driving the L.A. Freeways at night, snatching an occasional glance to the side at some yellow-lit kitchen window in a passing apartment building, and always for one moment desperately envying the lives of whatever people lived there. She had always imagined hammered-copper roosters on the kitchen wall, a TV in the next room with “Cheers” getting innocent laughs, children sitting cross-legged on the carpet—

(—Shut up.)

That had never really worked, either. Maybe those apartments had all been vacant, with the lights left on. She folded the magazine and put it back.

A few moments later she jumped, and looked toward the front of the bus just before the first returning passenger stepped aboard, rocking the bus on the shocks. Elizalde sighed. No, she couldn’t go back to Oklahoma.

For about twelve hours now she had been doing this, reacting to noises and jolts just before they happened. She’d been in bed when it started, and she’d awakened in her darkened apartment just before the clock radio had blared on. At first she had thought some mental clock had been keeping track of the time while she’d slept—she’d found herself remembering her grandmother’s saying, Es como los brujos, duerme con los ojos abiertos: He is like the witches, and sleeps with his eyes open—but the effect had continued as she’d proceeded to get ready for work, so that she’d flinched before water had come out of the shower head, and nearly dropped her hair dryer because it had seemed to quiver animately in her hand just as she was about to push the On button.

Then she had begun blinking her eyes even before the tears welled up in them. She’d sat down on her bathroom floor and just sobbed with fright, for in the same way that she’d seemed to be anticipating physical events, she had now been afraid that an idea was about to surface in her mind, an idea that she had been strenuously avoiding for two years. Before she’d been able to distract herself, the idea had hit her: maybe she had not, after all, had a psychotic schizophrenic episode in her Los Angeles clinic in 1990.

And, bleakly, she had known that she would have to go back there and find out. Find out if

One of them had finally been for real.

Everybody was getting back on the bus now, and the driver had the engine idling. Elizalde let her head sink back against the high, padded seat, and she thought she might at last be able to get some sleep, during the twelve hours it would take the bus to plow on through Flagstaff and Kingman and Barstow to, finally. Los Angeles.

After all, it seemed that nothing could sneak up on her.

Soy como las brujas, duermo con mis ojos abiertos.

PETE SULLIVAN clanked the gearshift into neutral and gunned the engine to keep it from stalling. He was stopped in what was supposed to be the fast lane of the 101, a mile or so short of the tunnel where the northbound Santa Ana Freeway would merge in. God only knew when he would get to Hollywood.

Though it was a non-holiday Friday morning, even on the westbound 60 the traffic had been jammed up—fully stopped much of the time, and occasionally speeding up and opening out in front of him for just enough moments to let him imagine that the congestion was behind him, before the red brake lights would all start glaring again ahead of him.

In the driver’s seat of his van he was above most of the other drivers, and during the course of an hour, while his foot had moved back and forth from the brake to the gas pedal, he had watched the towers of Los Angeles rise ahead of him in the brassy light. The towers had been scrimmed to dim silhouettes by the smog, as if they were faded shapes in a photograph that’s been left out too long in the sun—or, he had thought, as if the city has had its picture taken so many times that the cumulative loss of images had begun to visibly diminish it.

Like deLarava’s ghosts, he had thought. Maybe the whole city has died, but is too distracted to have realized it yet.

The towers were clearer now, and it was disorienting to see big buildings that he didn’t recognize—one of the new ones was a tall tan-stone cylinder, like a stylized sculpture of a rocket ship, and he wondered uneasily if he would still be able to find his way around the city’s streets.

His window was open to the diesel-reeking air, and he looked down over his elbow at the center divider, which in the old days had generally just been a featureless blur rushing past. Flowering weeds, and even a couple of midget palm trees, were pushing up out of cracks in the concrete, and curled around them and the many Budweiser cans was an apparently constant web of brown tape from broken stereo cassettes; there were even a lot of peaches for some reason, bruised but unbitten, as if some citizen of this no-man’s-land had left them there like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs.

Sullivan wondered what cassettes these were that drivers had so prodigally pitched out their windows, and he grinned nervously at the temptation to open the door and salvage some of the tape. It would be a cinch to clean it and wind it onto a fresh cassette-half. Would it all be the same kind of music, perhaps even all copies of the same tape? It occurred to him that the center divider looked like a miles-long shrine to primitive-but-urban gods; and he shivered and turned his attention back to the pickup truck in front of him, in the bed of which two Mexican girls were listlessly brushing their long black hair.

About an hour ago he had stopped peering ahead to see what wreck or freeway construction would be causing the traffic jam—apparently the freeways just snarled up without any definable cause these days, like the turbulence that would sometimes inexplicably shake a sump pipe at a power station even when all the air had been bled out of it.

In Los Angeles space is time, he thought—you don’t say I’m thirty miles from downtown, you say I’m half an hour from it. If unpredictable turbulence has become a real, constant factor in traffic, then all the maps and clocks are broken (like the Mad Hatter’s butter-clogged watch!) and you can only make a hazy guess about how far it might be from one point to another.

I’m a hundred years from Venice Beach, he thought, and a thousand miles from Christmas Eve of 1986. Better draw up a chart.

He pushed the thought away and concentrated on the traffic.

THE BREW 102 brewery proved to be gone. 102 had been the only beer Sullivan had ever encountered that had sediment in it, but he found that he missed the old black-and-yellow sign, and he was further disoriented to see half a dozen helicopters parked on the wide roof of a building on the other side of the freeway. With the glittering rocket still ahead of him, the whole place was looking like a poster for some 1930s science-fiction movie.

When he eventually gunned the van up the off-ramp at Hollywood Boulevard, though, there were beat-up old couches under the palm trees in the freeway border area, and a dispirited-looking group of ragged black men, their hair in ropy dreadlocks, were slouching there in the shade. He half expected to see chickens running around their skinny ankles, and a fire in a split oil drum behind them.

The clocks and maps are smashed and ripped to bits, he thought. Even though it was the best butter.

He drove west on Hollywood Boulevard, cautiously pleased to see that though the names of many businesses had changed—there was no Howard Johnson’s restaurant at Hollywood and Vine anymore—most of the actual buildings he remembered had survived.

It seemed to him that it had always been like this, in the area from Franklin south to Melrose and beyond. Every building looked as if it had originally been used for something else. Even here on Hollywood Boulevard, the odd top corners of the storefronts were frequently broken or bent, showing old brick underneath, and between buildings he could see brick alcoves, way up and far back, dating from God knew when. Tiny ironwork balconies still stuck out on second and third floors; with probably nothing behind them anymore but empty offices.

Now that he was nearly there—only one turn remaining, a right onto Laurel Canyon once he’d got out past this tourist area of the boulevard—he was in no hurry to get to the ruins he and his sister had explored on that spring day in ’86. At Wilcox he impulsively decided to turn north—and when he’d made the turn he saw that the Shelton Apartments had been torn down, replaced by some sprawling new pink apartment building.

He pulled the van over to the curb and switched off the engine for the first time since stopping for eggs and bacon in Blythe, four hours ago. Then for several minutes, while he lit a cigarette and stared across the street at the new four-story building, he tried to remember the old Shelton.

Like the Lido and the Mayfair, both of which were still standing a block farther up the street, the Shelton had had one of those big signs on the roof, separate ornate letters in line, supported by a lattice of steel beams, and had had a lot of the decorative cornices and balconies that architects never seemed to bother with anymore. The only eccentricities of this new place, the HOLLYWOOD STUDIO CLUB APARTMENTS, were inset windows and an apparent blanket policy of having all corners be rounded. A banner across the top announced $777 MOVES YOU IN! Probably not a bad price around here, he thought absently, these days. It had been while filming a documentary in the lobby of the old Shelton in the winter of ’84 that he and his sister had finally got a strong clue about what Loretta deLarava really did.

DeLarava had hired the twins right out of college ten years earlier, and they’d been working for her ever since as “gaffers”—lighting technicians. DeLarava produced short-subject films—in-house instruction pieces for businesses, nontimely human-interest bits for news programs, the occasional commercial—and for twelve years the twins had spent their days driving to what seemed like every corner of Los Angeles, to lay cables and set up Genie lifts and hang lights over some beach or office floor or sidewalk.

DeLarava had been a disconcerting boss. One of the first jobs the twins worked on with her had been a short film about the vandalizing of Houdini’s grave in Brooklyn in 1975—and deLarava had been the first to cover the event because it hadn’t even occurred before she arrived. It had been deLarava herself who shattered the stone bust of Houdini in the Machpelah Cemetery and took a mummified thumb out of a hollow inside it, and who had dug two plaster hands out of the soil in front of the grave. The twins had of course not even been tempted to turn their new boss in to the authorities—but, apparently on a drunken whim, Sukie had stolen the thumb and the hands from deLarava’s luggage on the drive back to the airport.

DeLarava had cried when she’d discovered the loss, and ransacked the car, and had even had to make new airline reservations because she insisted on driving back to the cemetery to look for the items, but Sukie had not ever admitted to the theft.

From the beginning Sukie had taken a perverse pleasure in tormenting their boss, and certainly deLarava was an easy target. The fat old woman always wore a rubber band around her scalp, with her hair brushed down over it to keep it from showing, and after Sukie had discovered the habit she made a point of finding opportunities to bump the woman’s head, dislodging the rubber band so that it sprang to the top of her head, making a wreck of her hair. And deLarava’s clothes always had Velcro closures instead of buttons or zippers, and Sukie frequently managed to get the old woman’s shoes or jackets attached to upholstered chairs or textured wallpaper, so that deLarava had to pull herself loose with an embarrassing tearing sound. And once, after a minute or so of silence during a drive, Sukie had glanced brightly at the old woman and said, “Yeah? Go on—? You were saying something about a picnic?”—acting as if their boss had just begun a sentence and then forgotten it—but deLarava had reacted with such fright to the disorienting gambit that Sukie had never tried that particular trick again.

At the Shelton they’d been filming in the lobby and in an upstairs hallway, and of course Pete and Sukie had arrived three hours before the rest of the crew to locate a 220-volt power source in the old building and set up the hydraulic lifts and hang the key lights. Sullivan remembered now that for an outdoor shot of the hotel they’d rented battery-powered lights made by a company called Frizzolini, and that Sukie had kept saying that deLarava had better be careful of getting her hair all frizzied. Possibly Sukie had been drunk already.

DeLarava herself had arrived early for that shoot. She would have been in her mid-fifties then, and for once she had been looking her age. She had always smoked some kind of clove-flavored Indonesian cigarettes that made a room smell as though someone were baking a glazed ham nearby, and on this morning her chubby hands had been shaking as she’d lit each one off the butt of the last, sparks dropping unnoticed onto the carpet, and her pendulous cheeks had quivered when she inhaled. She had brought with her a whole hatbox full of props to distribute around the shooting area; Sullivan remembered pocket watches, a couple of diamond rings, even a feather boa, in addition to the usual antique, still-sealed bottles of liquor.

The project had been a short morbid piece on the suicides that had taken place in the old building; perhaps the film had been done on spec, for Sullivan couldn’t now recall any particular client for the job, and he couldn’t remember it having gone through the post-production or screening steps. Incongruously, they had been filming it on Christmas Eve. The old woman had never let a Christmas Eve or a Halloween go by without filming something, somewhere.

Sullivan wondered uneasily what she might have scheduled for this upcoming Saturday.

DeLarava had been interested in only two of the suicides that had taken place at the Shelton. The first was a woman called Jenny Dolly—around the turn of the century Jenny Dolly and her twin sister Rosie were a celebrated dance team, renowned for their beauty; but Jenny’s face had been horribly scarred in a car crash in 1933, and she had hanged herself in her apartment here in 1941. The other suicide had been the actress Clara Blandick, who, one day in 1962, had got her hair fixed up and had carefully done her makeup and put on a formal gown and then pulled a plastic bag over her head and smothered herself. She was chiefly remembered for having played Auntie Em in the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz.

Auntie Em, Auntie Em, thought Sullivan now as he puffed on his cigarette echoing in his head the mocking voice of the Wicked Witch of the West in the movie.

And, he thought as he squinted through the smoke, a twin sister who killed herself. How’re you doing, Sukie?

The shoot had been what gaffers called a bad-hang day. The lights had been plagued with “ghosting,” the lamps glowing dimly even when the big old dimmer boxes indicated no power being transmitted, which called for a lot of laborious checks of the light board and all the cable connections; and then when the cameras were finally running, the shoot had repeatedly been interrupted by power surges and blackouts.

Apparently a lot of people had died at the Shelton, he thought now.

Live and learn.

DeLarava had kept looking at her watch, though the clock on the lobby wall was accurate. Twice Pete had peered at her watch as she glanced at it, and both times it had been wrong—differently wrong: once it would read, say, 6:30, and a few minutes later it would be indicating something like 12:35. At one point he had called Sukie over to one of the malfunctioning lights and in a low voice had told her about their boss’s erratic watch.

Sukie had followed deLarava around the carpeted lobby for a few minutes after that, ostensibly to ask about the placing of the props and the fill lights, and then she had come back to where Pete was still crouched over the flickering lamp; and she had told him in a whisper that no matter which way deLarava was facing, the hour hand of her watch always wobbled around to point up Wilcox—north. It was a compass.

Shortly after that the music had started up. DeLarava had liked to have taped music playing before the cameras started running, even during takes for which the soundtrack would be entirely dubbed in later—she said it helped establish the mood—and the music was always something contemporary with the period the film was dealing with. Today it was Glenn Miller’s “Tuxedo Junction,” and she had decided to start it up early.

As the audiotape reels started rotating and the first notes came razoring out of the speaker grilles, deLarava had turned away from the twins and fumbled something out of her purse. She was clearly trying to conceal it, but both of the twins saw that she was holding a drinking straw—one of the striped ones marketed for children, with a flexible neck and some kind of flavor capsule inside it to make plain milk taste like chocolate or strawberry.

SULLIVAN PITCHED his cigarette out the window and started up the van’s engine. Stopped ahead of him was a battered old blue-painted school bus with the back doors open, and inside it, on wooden shelves and on the floor, were crates of bananas and tortillas and garlic and long, dried red chili peppers. A mobile third-world grocery store, he thought, a hundred feet from the Hollywood Boulevard sidewalk.

It reminded him of lunch, and he wondered if Musso and Frank’s was still in business, a block or two west. He steered the van around the stopped bus and drove up Wilcox to make a U-turn back to the boulevard. Over the tops of the old apartment buildings in front of him he could see the Capitol Records building, designed long ago to look like a stack of vinyl records with a needle touching the top disk.

Vinyl records, he thought. The clocks and maps are definitely broken.

CHAPTER SIX

“I dare say you never even spoke to Time!”

“Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied: “but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.”

“Ah! that accounts for it,” said the Hatter. “He won’t stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

MUSSO and Frank’s Grill, Hollywood’s oldest restaurant, was still in business on the north side of the boulevard at Cherokee, and Sullivan parked around the corner and walked in through the double wood-and-glass doors and crossed to one of the booths under the eternal autumn-scene mural and the high ceiling. The Tuesday special was corned beef and cabbage, but he sentimentally ordered a sardine sandwich and a Coors.

This had been his and Sukie’s secret hideout; their friends and coworkers had hung out in trendier places like the City Cafe and the Cafe Figaro on Melrose, or the Ivy down on Robertson.

In fact, he and Sukie had driven here in 1984 for dinner right after the Christmas Eve shoot at the Shelton, and during the drive Sukie had been loudly singing gibberish Christmas carols—O car-bo-lic faith-less, poi-son-ously pregnant…O rum key, O ru-um key to O-bliv-i-on…Com-mander Hold-’Em, bone-dry king of a-angels…—and of course the old schoolyard song they’d got in trouble for singing in some foster home when they’d been seven, We three kings of Orient are, trying to smoke a rubber cigar; it was loaded, it exploded…

As soon as they’d got to the restaurant and been seated, Sukie had ordered a double Jack Daniel’s, and Pete, though he had wanted a beer, had wound up with a Coke, because when the waiter had walked up to their booth Pete had been leaning forward and saying, “Coke?”

After the waiter had left, Sukie had grinned and said, “Coke what?”

Pete had waved vaguely. “What she was doing. Loretta, our dignified boss, snorting a straw along the old hotel wallpaper! Old cocaine mixed up in the dust, do you think?”

In reply Sukie had resumed singing some badly remembered lines from “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”—“We wont go until we got some, we won’t go until we got some, we won’t go until we got some, so trot ’em out now.”

“What the hell, Suke,” Pete had said, bewildered by her manic cheer.

“I figure that’s what the Sodomites and—what would you call ‘em, Gomorrites?—were singing outside of Lot’s house, you know? In the Bible, when all of Lot’s neighbors wanted to bugger the angels that were visiting him. Loretta wouldn’t go today until she got some, and she did get some—she sucked ’em up through that straw.” The drinks had arrived then, and Sukie had drained hers in one long swallow and mutely signaled for another.

“Got some what?” Pete had said after a halfhearted sip of his Coke. “Angels? Angel dust? What?”

“Ghosts”, Sukie had said impatiently. “What did you think? She snorted up a whole pile of ghosts today—did you see how much younger she looked when she finally got into her car and split? She looked thirty years old tonight, a youthful thirty, and she looked a goddamn hundred this morning. We somehow made it possible for her to draw a whole lot of ghosts out of the walls of that place and then snort ’em up her nose.”

Pete hadn’t wanted to start discussing ghosts with his sister. “She’s a, something like a necrophiliac voyeur,” he said. “There’s probably a single word for it. She likes to go shoot films at cemeteries and places where people have died, and kind of rub her fingers in the dirt, we’ve noticed that in her before. Hell, I suppose there’s somebody somewhere who watches the tape of Jack Ruby shooting Oswald, over and over again. Getting off on…what, the thought that somebody really did die here. Creepy, but probably harmless right? But I’m afraid she’s going flat-out crazy now. Where does that leave our jobs? I mean, there she was, crouched over and snuffling along with a straw, as if some dead lady’s perfume might still be in the wallpaper!”

“Pete,” said Sukie, “I don’t mean perfume, and I don’t mean metaphorical ghosts. I mean there were real essences of dead people in that place, and she consumed them in some literal way, like a whale eating plankton.”

Pete stared at her. “Are you saying,” he asked carefully after a moment, “that you think she actually believes that?”

“God, you’re an idiot sometimes. I’m saying that’s what happened. She’s right to believe it, she did eat a bunch of ghosts. Didn’t she change, visibly, between eight this morning and nine tonight?”

Pete tried to smile derisively, but gave it up and let his face relax into a frown. “She did get something out of it,” he admitted. “But come on, ghosts?”

The word hadn’t sounded ludicrous in this dark wooden booth at Musso and Frank’s.

“And,” he found himself going on, “she is often…prettier and cheerier, after a shoot. Still damn fat.” He laughed uncertainly. “Do you suppose that’s what she’s been doing, all along? She never used a straw before. That we ever noticed, anyway.”

“I’m sure she’d have liked it better if we hadn’t seen her do that—but she obviously needed it too bad to be subtle this time. I bet she usually sucks ’em in through those damned cigarettes of hers—maybe ghosts are drawn to that clove smell, like kids to hot cookies. It was a flavored straw, you noticed.”

Sukie’s fresh drink arrived. Pete drained it himself, and Sukie glanced at her watch and then at the clock on the wall, and she asked for two more.

For a full minute neither of them spoke.

Pete was feeling the bourbon hit his fragile alertness like static muddying up an AM radio signal. “And of course it would have something to do with bar-time,” he said finally. “Ghosts are…if there are ghosts, they’re certainly a very derailed crowd, in terms of time.”

“Of course. And the electrical problems. We always have electrical problems, and she still not only doesn’t fire us, but pays us way too much.”

“We don’t always have electrical problems,” Pete said irritably. Then he made himself think about what Sukie had said. “Now you’re saying it has to be us? Specifically Pete and Sukie?”

“She acts like it, doesn’t she? Has she ever once hired anyone else? Those props, those watches and things, those were lures; but for some reason she needs us to make her able to hook ’em. Did you keep on looking at her watch?”

“Not after the first business,” he said glumly. Of course Sukie would have, once he’d told her about it.

“When we finally got started filming, the hour hand was pointing straight to the section of wall she took her straw to, every time, and it wasn’t north anymore.”

Pete grinned weakly. “Compass needles point to ghosts?

“Evidence of the old glazzies, droogie,” she said, quoting the movie A Clockwork Orange. Glazzies, he recalled, meant eyes. “Let’s get some menus,” she went on. “I may as well eat while I drink, and she’ll want her precious twins all peppy and full of vitamins tomorrow.”

HER PRECIOUS twins, Pete thought now as he finished his sardine sandwich and drank off the last of the Coors, alone in the booth on this sunny but cold morning eight years later.

The twins had continued working for deLarava, for precisely another two years, after that Christmas Eve; and Pete had eventually come to believe that Sukie was right about what deLarava had been doing at their shooting locations.

Neither of them, though, had seriously considered quitting. What the hell, Sukie had remarked more than once when she’d been drunk; it’s just exorcism, right? I mean, she inhales the ghosts and then they’re gone—obviously, since she never goes back and does a shoot at the same place twice. We’re exorcists, like that priest in that movie. And we didn’t take no vows of poverty.

No indeed, thought Sullivan now. DeLarava paid us damn well. And if she hadn’t tried to get us

car-bo-lic faithless, poi-so-nously pregnant

to do that muscle beach feature in Venice, on

bone-dry king of angels

Christmas Eve in 1986,

won’t go until we got one, so dredge him out now

we’d probably be working for her still, to this day.

He frowned intently at the check, tossed thirteen dollars onto the Formica table and walked quickly out of the restaurant into the chilly October breeze.

IT HAD been early in 1986 when they had hidden the mask in the ruins up on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Just a dried thumb and two plaster hands, but Sukie always referred to the set as “the mask.”

Sullivan steered the van back onto Hollywood Boulevard, heading west again; there was still only the one more turn ahead. On the south side of the street stood a new McDonald’s restaurant that looked like an incongruously space-age Grecian temple, but at least the Chinese Theater was still there in all its battered black and red byzantine splendor at Highland.

The boulevard narrowed after that, as it flowed west between big old apartment buildings and broad lawns, and around Fairfax the pavement of the eastbound lane was entirely ripped up for repairs, but the sun hung still a little short of noon in the empty blue sky when Sullivan reached Laurel Canyon Boulevard and turned right, up the hill.

The curling road had only one lane each way, and no shoulder at all between the pavement and the greenery hanging over bowed chain-link fencing, and he had to drive a good quarter of a mile past the place before he found a wider spot where the van could plausibly be parked without getting clipped by a passing car. And then the walk back down the hill was a series of lateral hops from the asphalt into the tall curbside grass every time a car came looming at him from around a corner ahead. Already he was sweating.

Even after six years he recognized the section of chainlink fence he was looking for, and when he stopped and hooked his fingers through it and peered up the wooded slope beyond, he saw that the ruins had not been cleared away. Nearly hidden under shaggy palm trees and oaks, the broad stone stairway swept up to the terrace at the top of the hill, and even from out here on the street he could see many of the broken pillars and sagging brick walls.

He was breathing deeply, and wondering almost resentfully why no one had planed this off and put up condos or something. The real estate must be worth a fortune. At last he unhooked his fingers and stepped back.

Several NO TRESPASSING signs were hung on the fence, but it was widely split at one point, and among the tall weeds beyond he could see empty twelve-pack beer cartons and a couple of blankets and even a sort of little tent made from an upended shopping cart. Sullivan glanced up and down the road, and at a moment when no cars were in sight he ducked through the gap and sprinted to the shade of the nearest palm tree. He picked his way through a dense hedge of blue-flowered vinca, and after a few seconds noticed that he wasn’t walking on dirt anymore—the soles of his black leather shoes were brushing dust and drifts of leaves off of paving stones that had been laid in the 1920s.

The stairs were broad between the low corniced walls, but were thickly littered with bricks and chunks of masonry and the brown palm fronds that had been falling untended for five decades; and sycamore branches hung so low in places that he practically had to crawl from step to step. When he had scrambled up to the second landing he paused to catch his breath. The air was still and silent and fragrant with eucalyptus, as if Laurel Canyon Boulevard and all of Hollywood were very far away. He couldn’t even hear any birds or insects.

A row of once-white marble pillars supporting nothing anymore ran along the top of a wall across the stairs from him, and below the wall a dead stone fountain poked up from a bank of dried leaves; the ruined architecture all looked Greek, or at least Mediterranean, and it occurred to him that time didn’t seem to pass here—or, rather, seemed already to have passed and left this place behind. Probably that’s why they don’t tear it all down, he thought. It’s too late.

HE WAS now three-quarters of the way up the dusty, overgrown slope. To his right was a little stone bridge over a dry streambed, and though both of the wide cement railings still arched over the gully, the middle six feet of the bridge’s floor had long ago fallen away. A weathered two-by-six beam spanned the gap, and he remembered that in 1986, at least, the beam had been sturdy enough to bear his weight.

He discovered that it still was, though it was springy and he had to stretch his arms out to the sides to keep his balance. On the far side he paused to wipe the dusty sweat off his face; he thought about lighting a cigarette, but looked around at all the dry brush and glumly decided he’d better not.

Then he froze—someone was moving around below him, clumsily, through the litter on one of the clogged side terraces. Sullivan couldn’t hope to see the person through the shaggy greenery below, but in the weighty silence he could hear someone mumbling and scuffling around.

One of the bums that live here, he thought. It doesn’t sound like a cop or a caretaker; still, the bum might draw the attention of such people, and I don’t want to get kicked out of here myself before I retrieve the mask. They might fix the fence, or even post guards, before I could get back. This place is a historical landmark, after all, though nobody seems to pay any attention to it.

He tiptoed through the fieldstone arch ahead of him and picked his way up a side stairway, which, being narrower, was relatively clear of debris. His fast breathing sounded loud in the still air.

There was another arch at the top, and he paused under it, for he was at the broad main terrace of the hill now, and he’d be visible crossing the cement pavement that stretched between the jungle below and the odd house in front of him.

The pavement was clear up here, and he let himself light a cigarette. Sukie, he recalled, had brought a flask, on that…March?…day in ‘86. That’s right, March—it had been Good Friday afternoon, which had seemed like a good day for burials.

At first the two of them had thought that this house—this narrow two-story building, brick below and stuccoed above, with castle-like crenellations along the roof as if the owner were ready to hire archers to repel attack from below—must be Houdini’s mansion, and they’d been surprised that the famed magician would live in such a little place. Later they’d learned that this was just the servants’ quarters. Houdini’s mansion had stood a hundred yards off to the south, and had burned down in the thirties. But this was nevertheless a part of the old Houdini estate. It would do fine as a place to hide the mask. “Hide a thumb in a place where there’s already a lot of its thumbprints,” Sukie had said.

SULLIVAN NOW stared uneasily at the house. The doors and windows were all covered with weathered sheets of plywood, but on the tiny upstairs balcony sat a flowerpot with a green plant growing in it. Had there been rain in L.A. recently? The palm fronds he’d climbed over below had been dry as mummies. Was some homeless person living in this place?

He decided to hide here for a little while and see if the noises on the slope had been heard and might draw someone out onto the balcony.

Sullivan recalled that he and Sukie had nearly killed themselves struggling up the slope six years ago, for they’d been “on bar-time big time,” as Sukie had said—they’d been feeling the roughness of a step underfoot before the shoe actually touched it, and the bark of a tree limb a second before the hand grasped it. But Sukie had been full of hectic cheer, chatting graciously with imaginary guests and singing misunderstood snatches from Handel’s Messiah. Sullivan had been constantly whispering at her to shut up.

No one seemed to be home in the little castle. Sullivan relaxed and sucked on his cigarette, and he looked up at the brushy slope beyond the house. The upper slope had advanced visibly since his previous visit—broken dirt was piled up right to the stones of the arch at the south end of the house now, and a section of ornate marble railing stuck up crookedly above and behind the arch like a bleached rib cage exposed by a cemetery landslide.

He jumped suddenly, and as his cigarette hit the pavement he heard a voice from the stairway he’d just climbed: “By the hair of my chinny-chin-chin—”

Sullivan crouched behind the house side of the arch as the voice went on, “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll eat you, billy-goat-gruff.”

It’s that bum, he thought nervously. He’s following me, and of course my gun is locked up back in the van.

Then he grinned at his momentary panic. Just a bum, he told himself. Forget him and go get the mask from the garage, which luckily is still standing. Sullivan stretched out his leg and stepped on the smoldering cigarette, but he was trembling, for the billy-goat-gruff remark had reminded him of the troll that had lived under a bridge in that old children’s story. Maybe, he thought as he made himself maintain his grin, I shouldn’t have walked across that board over the broken bridge back there.

He straightened up and stepped out into the sunlight and began walking across the old cement, careful not to kick any stray rocks.

The open-arched garage was a strange structure too, entirely fronted with tiny inset stones and with two broad castle-like merlons on the roof; the inside walls were all stonework as well, and the back wall was concave, as though to provide good acoustics.

After only a few steps he whipped his head back around to the left and saw a skinny old woman come shuffling around the corner of the house. Her white dress looked as if it had been elegant before someone had spent years sleeping, and apparently doing engine work, in it, but all she was wearing on her stained feet was a broken pair of plastic zoris. The soles flapped on the cement as she hunched toward him.

“I suppose you don’t want to lose your name?” she was calling anxiously.

Then Sullivan heard the bum scuffling quickly to the top of the stairs behind him. “Blow your house down!” he was cawing.

Sullivan broke into a run for the garage; he stomped and skidded inside and in an instant was crouched in the shadows against the back wall, digging in the loose dry dirt with his hands. It seemed to him that the dirt was colder than it had any right to be.

“Where the fuck,” he was keening to himself, just as he felt the plywood board he and Sukie had laid over Houdini’s mask. He paused, even though he could hear the bum wheezing his way across the driveway toward the garage. It’s not Houdini buried here, Sullivan reminded himself, it’s not even his ghost. He took a deep breath and lifted the board away in a shower of powdery dirt.

And he saw that the life-size plaster hands and the little cloth Bull Durham sack were still in the hole. If the bum was just a bum, Sullivan could probably chase him away by waving the plaster hands like clubs.

Even in his panic he grimaced with distaste as he tucked the sack into his shirt pocket, and then he made himself snatch up the plaster hands, and he turned toward the light of the entrance.

The bum from the hill slope was standing there, visible at last, and Sullivan saw that he did have hair on his chin; lots of it, white and matted. The man had his hands in the pockets of an enormous ragged overcoat, and he was rocking his head and peering in Sullivan’s direction.

Sullivan’s heart was pounding, for the man was clearly puzzled to see him. “What do you want?” Sullivan ventured. “How did you get in here?”

“I saw a guy—come in here,” mumbled the old man, “couldn’a had a hall pass, aren’t they—I forget. Where’d he go, anyway? I think he’s the guy that stole my…my Buick.” He was scuffling backward in confusion now. “I’m still pissed about that Buick.”

“He came in here,” said Sullivan, trying to keep the shakiness out of his voice. “I ate him. And I’m still hungry.” He could smell the old man now, the well-remembered tang of raw cheap wine oozing out through dead pores.

“Jesus God!” the old man exclaimed shrilly, his brown-mottled eyes wide. “Ate—him! I help out around here, ask anybody, I fold the newspapers—” He was flapping his shaky hands. “—rearrange the rocks and—branches, you know? Make it all neater.” He bared teeth that seemed to be made of the same bad stuff as his eyes. “You can’t eat me, not right on top of him.”

Sullivan jerked his head toward the slope and the ruined stairs. “Go, then.”

Nodding as rapidly as a pair of wind-up chattering teeth, the old man turned and began limping rapidly back toward the stairs.

Sullivan stepped out into the light, his heart pounding against the little bag in his pocket. The old woman had stopped a few yards away and was gaping at him uncertainly.

“I…was keeping your plant watered,” she said. “In most gardens they make the beds too soft—so that the flowers are always asleep:”

Sullivan recognized the line as something from the Alice in Wonderland books. So many of these poor souls had read them and somehow remembered them. Sukie had always said that the Alice books were the Old and New Testaments for ghosts—which Pete had never understood; after all, Lewis Carroll hadn’t been dead yet when he’d written them.

“Fine,” Sullivan told the old woman, making a vaguely papal gesture with one of the hands. “Carry on.”

The old man had by now scrambled some distance down the side stairway, and in a birdy old voice was calling, ‘I got away-ay! I got away-ay!” in the nyah nyah nyah-nyah-nah! cadence of spiteful children.

Sullivan glanced back in distaste, then turned and looked past the old woman at the driveway that curled away down the hill to Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Best to leave that way, he thought. I haven’t heard any sirens, and it’s less important, now, that I not be seen. At least now I’ve got the goddamn things.

“Excuse me,” he said, and stepped around the woman.

After a few moments, as he was trudging down the driveway, she called after him, “Are you animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

That was what the Lion had asked Alice, in Through the Looking-Glass. “It’s a fabulous monster!” he called back, quoting what the Unicorn had answered about Alice.

Don’t I wish, he thought.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“I ca’n’t help it,” said Alice very meekly. “I’m growing.”

“You’ve no right to grow here,” said the Dormouse.

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

THE van shook every time a car drove past it, but after carefully laying the plaster hands and the little bag with the dried thumb in it on the front seat, Sullivan climbed in the back and tossed the sheets and blanket and cushions off the unmade bed. The bed could be disassembled and partially telescoped to become a U-shaped booth with a little table in the middle, but when it was extended out like this, the boards under the booth-seat cushions could be lifted off, exposing a few cubic feet of unevident space. He hooked his finger through the hole in the forward board and levered it up out of its frame.

Inside the booth-seat box lay a couple of square, limp-plastic rectangles connected by two foot-and-a-half-long ribbons, and a gray canvas fanny-pack containing his 45 semi-automatic Colt and a couple of spare magazines.

He lifted out the fanny pack and helted it. He hadn’t shot the 45 since an afternoon of target practice in the desert outside Tucson with some of the other tramp electricians a couple of years ago, but he did remember cleaning it afterward, and buying a fresh box of hardball rounds and reloading all three magazines.

The strung-together plastic rectangles were meant to be worn around the neck while traveling, with one rectangle lying on the chest and the other back between the shoulder blades—right now he had about six and a half thousand dollars in hundreds in the one, and his union papers in the other. Sullivan always thought of the pair as his “scapular,” because the linked flat wallets looked like one of those front-and-back medallions Catholics wear to keep from going to hell. He was always vaguely embarrassed to wear it.

He glanced toward the front of the van, where the three pieces of Houdini’s “mask” lay on the passenger seat.

What would he put away in the seat box, and what would he keep out?

If he was going to drive straight back to Arizona and try to save his job at the Roosevelt Nuclear Generating Station, he would peel off a couple of hundred dollars to comfortably cover gas and food, and leave the rest of the cash hidden in the seat box here, along with the loaded gun, which was a felony to take across state borders; and the mask would be most effective where it was, out in the open. But if he was going to stay in Los Angeles for a while he’d have to allow for the possibility of being separated from, or even abandoning, the van—he’d want to have the cash and the gun on him, and the mask would have to be hidden from the sort of people who might get into the van and ransack it.

Another car drove past on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, and the van rocked on its shocks.

Stay in Los Angeles? he asked himself, startled even to have had the thought. Why would I do that? She works here, Loretta deLarava, and she probably still lives aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach and commutes right up through the middle of the whole city every day.

I’d be crazy to do anything but leave the mask on the front seat and drive… anywhere. If I’m screwed with the Edison network I can still get electrician work, in Santa Fe or Kansas City or Memphis or any damn place. I could be a plain old handyman in any city in the whole country, doing low-profile electric, as well as cement work and drywall and carpentry and plumbing. An independent small-time contractor, getting paid under the table most of the time and fabricating expenses to show to the IRS on the jobs where I’d have to accept checks.

And if I scoot out of here right now, I might not even be screwed with Edison.

SUKIE’S NONSENSE Christmas carols were still droning in the back of his head, and he found himself thinking about the last time he’d seen her, at the shoot at Venice Beach on Christmas Eve in ’86. He had somehow not ever been to Venice before—he was certain—and of course he had not been there since.

But on that overcast winter morning he had recognized the place. Driving around in one of deLarava’s vans, he had several times found himself knowing what he would see when he rounded the next corner: a gray old clapboard house with flowers growing in a window box, the traffic circle, the row of chipped Corinthian pillars lining Windward Avenue.

On this Christmas Eve of ’86, big red plastic lanterns and garlands of fake pine boughs had been strung around the tops of the pillars and along the traffic-signal cables overhead, and the sidewalks had been crowded with last-minute Christmas shoppers and children, and dogs on leashes, and there had seemed to be a car in every curbside parking slot—but the pavements in his flickering memory had been empty and stark white under a harsh summer sun, and in his memory the shadows in the gaping windows and behind the bone-white colonnades were impenetrably black, all as silent and still as a streetscape in some particularly ominous De Chirico painting.

Under an overcast sky the real, winter ocean had been gray, with streaks of foam on the faces of the waves, but luckily deLarava had not wanted to actually go out onto the sand. Sukie was already drunk and wearing sunglasses, and Pete had been shaking as he set up the lights along the sidewalk.

They’d been supposed to be doing a short subject on the bodybuilders who apparently spent all their days lifting weights in the little fenced-in yard by the pavilion at the bottom of Windward Avenue, but deLarava’s props had been old—a rented 1957 Buick, a Gigi movie poster to hang in a shop window—and she had had something else, too, that she’d carried in a shoebox.

(Sullivan was shaking now, holding the scapular and the gun.

(Idaho, he thought desperately, up in the Pelouse area where they grow lentils instead of potatoes. It’ll be snowing soon now, and people always need electrical work done when it gets real cold. Or, what the hell, all the way out to the east coast, way out to Sag Harbor at the far end of Long Island—there was a lot of repair work of all sorts to be done during the off season, and you could hardly get farther away from Los Angeles.)

But helplessly he found himself remembering the moment on that chilly morning when deLarava had put down the shoebox on a truck fender, and Sukie had found an opportunity to peek inside it—and then had screamed and flung it away from her onto the sidewalk.

Pete had already spun around in sudden fright, and he’d expected to see something like a dead rat, or even a mummified baby, roll out of the box; but what had come spilling out of the box, tumbling across the looping electrical cables on the beachfront sidewalk, had been a well-remembered brown leather wallet and ring of keys and, somehow worst of all, three cans of Hires Root Beer. One of the cans rolled up against Pete’s shoes, spraying a tiny jet of brown foam.

He and Sukie had simply fled then, mindlessly, running away up Windward Avenue. He had eventually stopped, winded, at a gas station somewhere up on Washington Boulevard, and had taken a cab to their apartment, and then driven his car to his bank, where he had cashed out his savings account. To this day he didn’t know or care where Sukie had run to. Pete had been in Oregon by the next afternoon. Sukie had eventually tracked him down through union records, and they had talked on the phone a few times, but they’d never knowingly been in the same state at the same time again.

AND NOW deLarava apparently wanted them back again. Sukie had obviously believed that the old woman intended to try the Venice “exorcism” again, with Pete and Sukie again present—voluntarily or not.

Sullivan tried to think of some other explanation. Maybe deLarava didn’t want the twins back, hadn’t thought about them in years and Sukie’s car had simply been hit by some random drunk, and the sudden onset of bar-time was caused by something that had nothing to do with deLarava; or deLarava might indeed want the twins back, but just to do the sort of work they’d done for her before, nothing to do with Venice; or she did want to do the Venice one again, but wouldn’t be able to, now, because Sukie had killed herself. The old lady would be unable to do it unless she got a new pair of twins.

He bared his teeth and exhaled sharply. She might try to do it again with some other pair of twins. Probably on Halloween, four days from now. Halloween was even better than Christmas, probably, for her purpose.

Well, he thought in any case, I’m out of it. It has nothing to do with (—a Hires Root Beer can rolling against his foot, wasting itself spraying a thin needle of foam out onto the sandy sidewalk—) me.

For five full minutes, while cars roared past outside the van, he just crouched over the open underseat box.

Finally, with trembling fingers, he unbuttoned his shirt and draped the ribbons of the scapular over his head and onto his shoulders. After he had rebuttoned the shirt he flipped the black web belt of the fanny pack around his waist and snapped the buckle shut. Then he straightened up to go fetch the plaster hands so that he could put them away and reassemble the bed. The thumb in the Bull Durham sack he could carry in his shirt pocket.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“How are you getting on?” said the Cat, as soon as there was mouth enough for it to speak with.

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

KOOTIE awoke instantly when he heard someone scramble over the wooden fence downstairs, but he didn’t move, only opened his eyes. The scuffed planks of the balcony floor were warm under his unbruised cheek; by the shadow of the big old banana tree he judged the time to be about four in the afternoon.

He had found this enclosed courtyard at about noon; somewhere south of Olympic he’d picked his way down an alley between a pair of gray two-story stucco-fronted buildings that had no doubt housed businesses once but were featureless now, with their windows painted over; a wooden fence in the back of one of the buildings was missing a board, leaving a gap big enough for Kootie to scrape through.

Towering green schefflera and banana and avocado trees shaded the yard he had found himself in, and he’d decided that the building might once have been apartments—this hidden side was green-painted clapboard with decoratively framed doors and windows, and wooden steps leading up to a long, roofed balcony. Someone had stored a dozen big Coca-Cola vending machines back here, but Kootie didn’t think anyone would be coming back for them soon. He doubted that anyone had looked in on this little yard since about 1970. It was a relief to be able to take the adult-size sunglasses off his nose and tuck them into his pocket.

He had climbed the rickety old stairs to the balcony, and then had just lain down and gone to sleep, without even taking off his knapsack. And he had slept deeply—but when he awoke he remembered everything that had happened to him during the last twenty hours.

HE COULD hear the faint scuff of the person downstairs walking across the little yard now, but there was another sound that he couldn’t identify: a recurrent raspy hiss, as though the person were pausing here and there to slowly rub two sheets of coarse paper together.

For several seconds Kootie just lay on the boards of the balcony and listened. Probably, he told himself, this person down in the yard won’t climb the steps to this balcony. A grown-up would worry that the stairs might break under his weight. Probably he’ll go away soon.

Kootie lifted his head and looked down over the balcony edge—and swallowed his instinctive shout of horror, and made himself keep breathing slowly.

In the yard, hunched and bent-kneed, the ragged man in camouflage pants was moving slowly across the stepping-stones, his single arm swinging like the clumped legs of a hovering wasp. The baseball cap kept Kootie from seeing the man’s face, but he knew it was the round, pale, whiskered face with the little eyes that didn’t seem to have sockets behind them to sit in.

Kootie’s ears were ringing shrilly.

This was the man who had tried to grab him in the living room of Kootie’s house last night—Hey, kid, come here. This was almost certainly the man who had murdered Kootie’s parents. And now he was here.

The rasping sound the man was making, Kootie realized now, was sniffing—long, whistling, inhalations. He was carefully seining the air with his nose as he made his slow way across the yard; and every few seconds he would jerk heavily, as if an invisible cord tied around his chest were being tugged.

Kootie ducked back out of sight, his heart knocking fast. He’s been following me, Kootie thought. Or following the glass brick. What does the thing do, leave a trail in the air like tire tracks in mud?

He is going to come up the stairs.

Then Kootie twitched, startled, and an instant later the bum began talking. “You came in here through the fence,” said the bum in a high, clear voice, “and you didn’t leave by that means. And I don’t think you have a key to any of these doors, and I don’t think you can fly.” He laughed softly. “Therefore you’re still here.”

Kootie looked toward the far end of the balcony; it ended at a railing just past the farthest door, with no other set of stairs.

I can jump, he thought tensely. I can climb over the railing and hang from as low a place as I can hold on to, and then drop. Scramble out of the yard through the fence before this guy can even get back down the stairs, and then just run until…until I get to the ocean, or the Sierras, or until I drop dead.

“Let me tell you a parable,” said the man below, still audibly shuffling across the leafy yard. “Once upon a time a man killed another man, and then he was…sorry, and wanted to be forgiven. So he went to the dead man’s grave, and dug him up, and when he opened the casket he saw that the man inside it was himself, smiling at the joke.

“Hah!”

The balcony shook as a muscular hand grabbed the vertical rail-post in front of Kootie’s eyes, and two shod feet loudly scuffled for traction on the planks, inches from Kootie’s own feet; and the round face had poked up above the balcony floor and the bum’s little black eyes were staring straight into Kootie’s.

Kootie had rolled back against the wall, but now couldn’t move, or breathe, or think.

The inches-away mouth opened among the patchy whiskers, opened very wide, and out of it grated a million-voice roar like a stadium when a player hits a home run.

Then Kootie had kicked himself up and was running for the far end of the balcony, but behind him he heard the fast booming scuffle of the man scrambling up onto the planks, and before Kootie reached the rail his head was rocked as the bum snatched at his curly hair.

Kootie sprang, slapped the balcony rail with the sole of his left Reebok, and was airborne.

Banana leaves were whipping his face, and he tried to grab a branch but only managed to skin his palm and go into a spinning fall. His knapsack and the base of his spine hit the hard dirt in almost the same instant that his feet did, and his head was full of the coppery taste of pennies as he scrambled on all fours, unable to work his lungs, toward the fence.

By the time he reached the alley he could at least wring awful whooping and gagging sounds out of his chest, and could even get up onto his feet, and he hopped and hunched and sobbed his way to the street sidewalk.

A pickup truck with its bed full of lawnmowers and fat burlap sacks was groaning past in the slow lane, and Kootie forced his numbed and shaking legs to run—and after a few pounding seconds he managed to collide with the truck’s tailgate, his knees on the bumper and his arms wrapped around the two upright metal tubes of a power-mower handle. At least his feet were off the ground.

But the truck’s old brakes were squealing now, and Kootie was being pushed against the tailgate as the battered vehicle ground to a halt. He used the momentum to help him climb into the truck bed, and then, kneeling on a burlap sack that reeked of gasoline and the stale-beer smell of old cut grass, he waved urgently at the rear view mirror. “Go,” Kootie croaked, “start up, go!”

Through the dusty rear window he could see that the Mexican driver had put his elbow up on the back of the seat and was looking back at him. He was waving too, and mouthing something, no doubt ordering Kootie to get out of the truck.

Kootie looked back, toward the alley, and saw the one-armed bum stride out from between the two gray buildings into the brassy, late-afternoon sunlight, smiling broadly straight at him.

Kootie sprang over the burlap sacks and banged his fist on the truck’s back window, and he managed to scream: “Go! Vaya! Ahora! Es el diablo!”

The driver might not have heard him, but Kootie could see that the man was looking past Kootie now, at the advancing bum; then the driver had turned back to the wheel and the truck lurched forward, swerving into the left lane and picking up some speed.

Kootie peered behind them through the swaying fence of lawnmower handles and weed whips. The bum had slowed to a strolling pace on the receding sidewalk, and waved at Kootie just before the intervening, cars and trucks hid him from view.

Kootie sat back against a spare tire, hoping the driver would not stop for at least several blocks. When he stretched out his legs his right ankle gave him a momentary twinge of pain; he tugged up the cuff and saw that it was already visibly thicker than the left ankle.

The ankle felt hot, too, but his stomach was suddenly icy with alarm. Am I gonna be limping for a while? he thought. How fast can I limp?

FIVE MINUTES later the driver of the pickup truck turned in to a Chevron station. He opened the driver’s-side door and got out, and as he unscrewed the truck’s gas cap he nodded to Kootie and then jerked his head sideways, obviously indicating that this was as far as he meant to take his young passenger.

Kootie nodded humbly and climbed over the tailgate. His right ankle took his weight well enough, but had flared with pain when he’d rotated it in climbing down.

“Uh, thanks for the ride,” Kootie said. He fished the sunglasses out of his pocket and pushed them onto his nose.

“Sí”, said the man, unhooking the gas-pump nozzle and clanking up the lever. “Buena suerte” He began pumping gas into the tank.

Kootie knew that those Spanish words meant good luck. The sunlight was slanting straight down the east-west lanes of the street, and the shadows of the cars were lengthening.

Kootie was more upset about what he had to do now than he was by his injured ankle. “Uh,” the boy said quickly, “lo siento, pero…tiene usted algunas cambio? Yo tengo hambre, y no tengo una casa.” Kootie wished he had paid more attention in Spanish class; what he had tried to say was I’m sorry, but do you have any change? I’m hungry and I don’t have a house.

His face was cold, and he had no idea whether he was blushing or had gone pale.

The man stared at him expressionlessly, leaning against the gas nozzle’s accordioned black rubber sleeve and squeezing the big aluminum trigger. Kootie could faintly hear gasoline sloshing in the filler pipe, though the air smelled of fried rice and sesame oil from a Chinese restaurant across the street. Eventually the gas pump clicked off, and the man hung up the nozzle and stumped away to the cashier to pay. Kootie just stood miserably by the back bumper of the truck.

When the man came back he handed Kootie a five-dollar bill. “Buena suerte”, he said again, turning away and getting back into his truck.

“Thanks,” said Kootie. “Gracias”. He looked back to the west, and as the truck clattered into gear behind him and rocked back out onto the street, Kootie stood on the oil-stained concrete and wondered where the one-armed bum was right now. Somewhere to the west, for sure.

Kootie started walking eastward down the sidewalk. His ankle didn’t hurt if he kept his right heel off the ground and walked tiptoe.

Sleep, he thought dazedly—where? There’s no way I can go to sleep, stop moving. He’ll catch up. Maybe I could sleep on a train—”hop a freight.”

Right.

Can I hide?

Most of the buildings in L.A. were low—three stories or shorter—and he looked around at the rooftops. Every one of them seemed to have a smaller house on top, in behind the old insulators and chimneys.

He’s only got one arm, Kootie thought; maybe I can climb somewhere that he can’t get to.

Right. With my sprained ankle?

Kootie was walking fairly briskly, and it seemed to him that he was just barely keeping ahead of panic.

He had passed many empty lots. He could describe the typical one now—fenced in with chain-link, with a few shaggy palm trees and a derelict car, and lines of weeds tracing lightning-bolt patterns across the old asphalt. Maybe he could get into a lot, and be ready to wake up and run when he heard the one-armed bum climbing the fence.

AT THE intersection ahead of him a man in an old denim jacket was standing on the sidewalk with a dog beside him. The dog was some kind of black German-shepherd mix, and the man was holding a white cardboard sign. When Kootie limped up beside them the dog began wagging its tail, and Kootie stooped to catch his breath and pat the dog on the head.

“Bueno perro”, Kootie told the man. He could now see that the hand-lettered sign read, in big black letters, WILL WORK FOR FOOD—HOMELESS VIETNAM VET.

“Sí”, the man said. “Uh… cómo se dice…perro is dog, right?”

“Right,” Kootie said. “Nice dog. You speak English.”

“Yeah. You got no accent.”

“I’m Indian, not Mexican. India Indian. Anyway, I was born here.”

The man he was talking to could have been of any race at all, almost of any age at all. His short-cropped white hair was as curly as Kootie’s, and his skin was dark enough so that he might be Mexican or Indian or black or even just very tanned. His lean face was deeply lined around the mouth and the vaguely Asian eyes, but Kootie couldn’t tell if that was a result of age or just exposure to lots of weather.

“Where do you two live?” Kootie found himself asking.

“Nowhere, Jacko,” the man said absently, watching the traffic over Kootie’s head. “Why, where do you live?”

Kootie patted the dog’s head again and blinked back tears of exhaustion, glad of the sunglasses. “Same place.”

The man looked down again and focused on Kootie. “Really? Here?”

Kootie blinked up at him and tried to understand the question. “If it was here, how could it be nowhere?”

“Hah. You’d be surprised. Act cool, now, okay?”

The light had turned red, and a big battered blue Suburban truck had stopped at the crosswalk lines. The driver leaned across the seat and cranked down the passenger-side window. “Nice dog,” he said through a ragged mustache. “How you all doing?”

“Not so good,” said the white-haired man standing beside Kootie. “My son and I and the dog been standing out here all day waitin’ for someone who needs some kind of work done and we’d like to be able to stay in a motel, tomorrow being Sunday and us wantin’ to get a shower before church, you know? We’re just six bucks short right now.”

Kootie rolled his eyes anxiously behind the sunglasses. Tomorrow was Wednesday, not Sunday.

“Shit,” said the driver. Then, just as the light turned green, he tossed a balled-up bill out the window. “Make it count!” he yelled as he gunned away across the intersection.

The white-haired man had caught the bill and uncrumpled it—it was a five. He grinned down at Kootie, exposing uneven yellow teeth. “Good job. So whatta you, a runaway?”

Kootie glanced nervously back up the street to the west. “My parents are dead.”

“Some kind of foster home? Go back to wherever it is, Jacko.”

“There isn’t any place at all.”

“There isn’t, huh?” The man was watching traffic, but he glanced down at Kootie. “Well there was a place, I believe, a day or two ago. That’s a Stussy shirt, and those Reeboks are new. Where were you plannin’ to sleep? Any old where? You get fucked up bad around here, Jacko, trust me. Whole streets of chickenhawks looking for your sort. Nastiness, know what I mean?” He squinted around, then sighed. “You wanna move in with Fred and me for a couple of days?”

Kootie understood that Fred was the dog, and that helped; still he said quickly, “I don’t have any money at all.”

“Bullshit you don’t, you got two bucks just in the last couple of seconds. Fred takes twenty percent, okay? Let’s work this corner for another ten minutes, and then we can move up to Silver Lake.”

Kootie tried to figure where Silver Lake was from here. “That’s a long walk, isn’t it?”

“Fuck walk, and in fact fuck talk, we got a red light coming up again here. I got a car, and Fred and I keep moving. Trust me, you be doin' yourself a favor to ride along with us.”

Kootie looked desperately at the dog’s wide grin and brown eyes, and he thought about keep moving, and then he blurted, “Okay.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Kootie.”

The man clasped Kootie’s hand in his own dry, callused palm. “Kootie? No kidding. I’m Rightful Glory Mayo. Known as Raffle.” Then, more loudly, he said, “Can we wash your car windows, ma’am? My boy and I haven’t had anything to eat all day.”

Raffle didn’t even have a squirt bottle or a newspaper to wash windows with, but the woman in the Nissan gave them a dollar anyway.

“That’s another forty cents you got, Kootie,” said Raffle as the light turned green. “You know, we might do better if you ditched the shades—makes you look like a pint-size doper.”

Kootie took off the sunglasses and looked mutely up at Raffle. He had no idea what color his eye socket was, but it was swollen enough to perceptibly narrow his vision.

“Well now, little man,” Raffle said, “you’ve had a busy day or two, haven’t you? Yeah, keep the shades—people will think I gave you that, otherwise.”

Kootie nodded and put the glasses back on—but not before he had nervously looked westward again.

CHAPTER NINE

“I only took the regular course.”

“What was that?” inquired Alice.

“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Unification, and Derision.”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

RAFFLE was obviously pleased with the money they made during the next ten minutes and he dug a laundry marking pen out of the pocket of his topmost shirt and, under the words HOMELESS VIETNAM VET, he added WITH MOTHERLESS SON.

“We gonna make booyah bucks on this,” ‘said Raffle with satisfaction. “We probably be sleepin’ in motels every night.”

Kootie thought of sleeping on wheels. “I don’t mind a car,” he said, struggling to keep the impatience out of his voice. He still hadn’t seen the one-armed man, but he could imagine him watching from behind some wall.

“Good attitude,” Raffle said. “Hey, we should be shifting locations—you want a beer?”

Kootie blinked. “I’m only eleven.”

“Well, I’ll drink it if you don’t want it. Come on.”

They walked across the street to a little liquor store, Fred following closely on their heels, and Raffle bought a bottle of Corona in a narrow paper bag.

“Let’s head for the car,” he said as they walked back out onto the sidewalk.

The car was a twenty-year-old mustard-colored Ford Maverick parked behind a nearby Laundromat, and the back seat was piled with clothes and Maxell floppy-disk boxes and at least a dozen gray plastic videocassette rewinders. Fred hopped up onto the clutter when Raffle unlocked the door, and Raffle and Kootie sat in the front seats.

Raffle levered the cap off the beer bottle against the underside of the dashboard. In an affectedly deep voice, he said, “What’s your name, boy?”

Catching on that Raffle was pretending to be someone else, Kootie said, “Mayo. Uh, Jacko Mayo.”

“Very good.” Raffle took a long sip of the beer. “We used to live in La Mirada, that’s forty-five minutes south of here on the 5, okay? Four-bedroom house, only place you ever lived. I used to be a car mechanic, but your mom was a legal secretary and she made the real money, but she didn’t have health insurance and when she got cancer we lost everything, and then she died. Nobody’s likely to ask you for anything more than that, but if it ever comes up, just start crying. Can you cry if you have to?”

Kootie thought about it. “Easy.”

“Great. Now are we black or white or Mexican or Indian or what?”

“To work for both of us? I’d just say—” He shrugged. “—we’re Angelenos. We just…grew up out of the sidewalks.”

“Good. Don’t remember no old days at all.” Raffle tilted up the bottle and drained the last of the beer. “Now, there’s some…things you’re gonna have to just get used to seeing, okay? Like if you suddenly moved to…Borneo or Australia or somewhere, they might do stuff that you were always taught was bad, but it’s okay there, right? I mean, as long as they don’t say you’ve got to do ’em. You just consider it higher education.”

“Right,” said Kootie cautiously.

“Okay. There’s a little nail in the ashtray, lemme have it, hm?”

Kootie found the nail and handed it to the man.

Raffle put the point of the nail into a little dimple in the base of the glass beer bottle, and then he picked up an old shoe from between the seats and whacked the head of the nail with it; the point was now inside the bottle, though the bottle hadn’t broken, and Raffle twisted it back out, then blew through the hole.

“All us good Dagwood-type dads smoke pipes,” he said. Then he reached under the seat and dragged up a box of Chore Boy scrubbing pads and prized a little cushion of steel wool out of the box. He tore off a bristly shred of the stuff and tucked it like a little bird’s nest into the neck of the bottle, and then replaced the rest of the pad and pushed the box back under the seat.

“If you see a one-time,” Raffle said, “don’t change your expression or look around, but slap me on the leg.”

Kootie remembered reading in the newspaper that one-time was a street term for policeman. “Is this,” he faltered, “some kind of—no offense—dope thing?”

“Just say yo,” Raffle agreed. Out of a hole in the double thickness of his shirt cuff he dug a tiny fragment of what seemed to be white stone, like a piece off one of the ones Kootie’s father had spread around the plants in the atrium pots, and Raffle carefully laid it in the nest of steel wool at the top of the empty beer bottle.

Raffle slouched down in the seat and held the bottle up to the textured plastic head liner, which Kootie now noticed was dotted with scorch marks, and the man put his mouth to the little hole he’d punched in the bottle’s base; then he flicked a long orange-plastic Cricket lighter and held the flame to the piece of rock as he sucked.

Kootie looked away as the bottle began to fill with pale smoke. His heart was pounding but he didn’t see any “one-times,” and in just a couple of seconds Raffle had opened the door and rolled the bottle away across the parking lot.

Raffle exhaled, and Kootie smelled burned steel wool and a faint chemical tang. “Never hang on to a pipe,” Raffle told him hoarsely as he began grinding the starter motor. “There’s always another at the next liquor store.”

“Dagwood probably saved ’em,” said Kootie bravely.

Raffle laughed as the engine finally caught and he clanked the transmission into reverse. “Yeah,” he said, still hoarse. “He probably had all kinds of oak pipe racks, full of cans and bottles. Blondie would dust ’em, and sometimes break one of the bottles and make him real mad—I had that Corona broke in perfect, you bitch!”

Kootie laughed nervously. Raffle made a left turn onto Fourth Street and angled into the far right lane to get on the southbound 110 Freeway.

“I thought we were going to Silver Lake,” said Kootie. “Isn’t that north?”

“Detour for medical supplies.”

THEY GOT off three miles south at the Vernon Avenue exit, and Raffle parked in the empty lot of a burned-out gas station.

“The plan’s this,” he said as he rolled up the driver’sside window. “Me and Fred will be gone for twenty minutes or so. You keep the doors locked, and if anybody tries to mess with you, just lean on the horn until they go away, right? A one-time, roll the window down and smile and say you’re waitin’ for your dad. When we get back, it’s dinnertime.”

Kootie nodded, and Raffle grinned and got out of the car. He folded the seat forward so that Fred could scramble out onto the pavement, and then the door was shut and locked and the two of them had gone loping away down the sidewalk and around a corner.

Kootie realized that Raffle was going to go spend some of the afternoon’s income on more drugs, but he never even considered getting out of the car and walking away. He remembered watching the riots on TV six months ago, and he imagined that the people around here would break his face off with bricks if they so much as saw him on the sidewalk.

He wondered what kind of food Raffle generally ate. Kootie was ready to eat just about anything at all.

He hiked up on the car seat and looked around. Dimly in the bay of the ruined gas station he could see the brown shell of a burned-up car, still raised up off the floor on the hydraulic lift; Kootie wondered if the owner had ever come by to see if any progress was being made on whatever repairs he’d brought the car in for. The tall palm trees along the sidewalks were black silhouettes against the darkening sky, and lights had begun to come on in shop windows up and down the street. Raffle’s car smelled like unbathed dog, and Kootie wished he were allowed to roll down the windows…Big speakers were playing music somewhere not too far away, but all Kootie could hear was the pounding bass and a lot of angry, rhythmic shouting.

He sat back down. The one-armed bum would no doubt show up here, tracing the smell or warped refraction or abraded air or whatever effect it was that the glass-brick thing left as a track, but Kootie and his new friend—friends, plural, counting the dog—would be long gone.

He flipped the straps of the knapsack off of his shoulders and dragged it around onto his lap and unknotted the straps. Then he dug around among the clothes until he found the glass brick.

He lifted it out and turned it against the windshield, trying to see the fading day-light through the murky glass depths. The brick still clicked faintly when he turned it, as though there was something hard and transparent inside. He rocked it in time to the incomprehensible music from outside. Tick, tick, tick.

He was pretty sure he should just pitch it—toss it into the wrecked gas station and let the wrecked bum find it. Or the lady he’d seen in the Jaguar last night—“a hundred dollars for your cigar”—she could come and get it, and have her tires rotated and burned up, as long as she was here.

He gripped the glass thing in his palms the way he had on the Fairfax sidewalk this morning; again he could feel the halves of it shift when he pulled at it, and he looked nervously at the street, but none of the cars driving by stalled.

Prying hard and rocking the halves away from each other, he soon had them almost completely separated. One more tug, and the thing would be opened.

He thought again of the Robert Louis Stevenson story, the one about the demon in the bottle. Here by the burned-out gas station, though, in Raffle’s car full of Raffle’s litter, on this alien street, it no longer seemed likely that some kind of old-world monster would erupt out of the little glass box.

He lifted off the top half.

And nothing happened. Inside it, laid into a fitted cavity in the glass was…a test tube? A glass vial, with a tapered black-rubber stopper. He put the halves of the glass brick down on his lap and lifted out the vial.

He could see that it was empty. He found that he was disappointed, and he wondered what the vial might once have contained. Somebody’s blood, mummy dust, gold nuggets with a curse on them?

He twisted out the stopper and sniffed the vial.

CHAPTER TEN

Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, “just like a starfish,” thought Alice. The poor little thing was snorting like a steam-engine when she caught it, and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again, so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much as she could do to hold it.

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

AS if he had plugged in the wires for the second of a pair of stereo speakers—as if he’d attached the wires when the second stereo channel was not only working but had its volume cranked up high—Kootie’s head was abruptly doubly hit by the the ongoing music from outside now; and he found himself somehow jolted, shocked, by the mere fact of being able to hear.

Dropping the vial, he grabbed the steering wheel and gripped it hard, gritting his teeth, cold with sudden sweat, for he was falling with terrible speed through some kind of gulf—his eyes were wide open and he was aware that he was seeing the dashboard and the motionless windshield wipers and the shadowed sidewalk beyond the glass, but in his head things clanged and flashed as they hurtled incomprehensibly past, voices shouted, and his heart thudded with love and terror and triumph and mirth and rage and shame all mixed together so finely that they seemed to constitute life itself, the way rainbow colors on a fast-spinning disk all blur into white.

It wasn’t stopping. It was getting faster.

Blood burst out of his nose and he pitched sideways across the passenger seat onto his right shoulder, twitching and whimpering, his eyes wide open but rolled so far back into his head that he couldn’t see anything outside the boundaries of his own skull.

PETE SULLIVAN jackknifed up out of the little bed and scrambled for the front seat—but when he yanked the curtain back from the windshield he saw that the van was not careening down some hill. He almost shouted with relief; still, he tumbled himself into the driver’s seat and tromped hard on the emergency brake.

Ahead of him, beyond a motionless curb, half a dozen boys in baggy shorts and T-shirts were strolling aimlessly across a broad lawn. Their shadows were long, and the grass glowed a golden green in the last rays of sunlight.

Sullivan’s heart was pounding, and he made himself wait nearly a full minute before lighting a cigarette, because he knew his hands were shaking too badly to hang on to one.

At last he was able to get one lit and suck in a lungful of smoke. He’d had a bad dream—hardly surprising!—something about…trains? Electricity? Sudden noise after a long silence…

Machinery. His work at the nuclear power plant, at the other utilities? The whole Edison network—Con Ed, Southern California Edison…

He took another long drag on the cigarette and then stubbed it out. The van was in shadow now, definitely not moving, and the sky was darkening toward evening. He breathed slowly and evenly until his heartbeat had slowed down to normal. Should he go find something to eat, or try to get some more sleep?

He had driven the van back down Laurel Canyon Boulevard and parked it here in the La Cienega Park lot, south of Wilshire. He had pulled the curtains over the little windows in the back and dragged the rings of the long shade across the curtain rod over the windshield and behind the rearview mirror, and had then locked up and crawled into the bed. He had apparently slept for several hours.

The boys in the park were at the top of a low green hill now, their laughing faces lit in chiaroscuro by the departing sun. Griffith’s hour, Sullivan thought.

He fumbled in his pocket now for his keys. No way sleep, after that jolt. Dinner, then—but a drink somewhere first.

ON THE Greyhound bus, Angelica Anthem Elizalde had been dreaming of the ranch in Norco where she had spent her childhood.

Her family had raised chickens, and it had been Angelica’s job to scatter chicken scratch in the yard for the birds. Wild chickens that a neighbor had abandoned used to roost in the trees at night, and bustle around with the domesticated birds during the day. All of the chickens, and a dozen cats and a couple of goats as well, had liked to congregate around the trail of dry dog food Angelica’s mother would spread by the driveway every morning. The half-dozen dogs had never seemed to mind.

It had always been her grandfather whose job it was to kill the chickens—he would grab a chicken by the neck and then give it a hard overhand whirl as if he had meant to see how far he could throw it but forgot to let go, and the bird’s neck would be broken. Angelica’s mother had tried it one time when the old man had been in jail, and the creature hadn’t died. The chicken had done everything but die. It was screaming, and flapping and clawing, and feathers flew everywhere as her mother tried lashing it around again—and again. All the kids were crying. Finally they had got an axe from the shed, a very dull old axe, and her mother had managed to kill the chicken by smashing its skull. The meat had been tough.

For the occasional turkey they would cut a hole in a gunny sack—her mother always called them guinea sacks—and hang the bird in it upside down from a tree limb, and then cut the bird’s throat, standing well back. The sack was to keep its wings restrained—a turkey could hurt you if it hit you with a wing.

One Easter her father had trucked home a live pig, and they had killed it and butchered it and cooked it in a pit the men dug in the yard—the giant vat of carnitas had lasted for days, even with all the neighbors helping to eat it. For weeks before that, her mother had saved eggshells whole by pricking the ends with a hatpin and blowing the egg out; she had painted the eggshells and filled them with confetti, and the kids ran around all morning breaking them over each other’s heads, until their hair and their church clothes looked like abstract pointillist paintings.

One of them had finally been for real—late in the afternoon her brother had broken a real, ripe, fertilized egg over Angelica’s head, and when she had felt warm wetness on her scalp, and had reached up to wipe it off, she had found herself holding a spasming little naked red monster, its eyes closed and its embryonic beak opening and shutting.

HER DREAM had violently shifted gears then—suddenly there was clanging and lights, and train whistles howling in fog, and someone was nearly insane with terror.

With a jolt she was awake, sitting up stiffly in the padded bus seat, biting her lip and tasting the iron of her own blood.

It’s…1992, she told herself harshly. You’re on a bus to Los Angeles and the bus is not out of control. Look out the window—the bus is staying in its lane and not going more than sixty.

You’re not dead.

She looked up, beyond the rushing darkening lanes, to the flat desert that was shifting by so much more slowly. Probably the bus was somewhere around Victorville by now, still an easy sixty miles out of L.A.

On her panicked late-afternoon drive out of Los Angeles two years ago she had seen a Highway Patrol car behind her, just south of Victorville, and she had meticulously pulled off and let him go on by, and had had a hamburger at a Burger King alongside the freeway. Then she had driven the next dozen miles northeast on a side road paralleling the freeway, to let the cop get far ahead. Even on the side road she had stopped for a while, at a weird roadside lot among the Joshua trees where a white-bearded old man had assembled a collection of old casino signs, and big plywood caricatures of a cowboy and a hula dancer, and assortments of empty bottles hung on the bare limbs of scrawny sycamores, out here in the middle of the desert. Out of sympathy for another outcast, she had bought from him a book of poems he’d written and had published locally.

Now, biting her nails aboard a rushing Greyhound bus, she wondered if the old man was still there, wondered if Southern California still had room for such people.

Or for herself. She and the old man at the ramshackle roadside museum had both at least been alive.

THE MAN known as Sherman Oaks screamed when the heat scalded his left arm, and he fell to his knees in the lush ice plant of the shadowy freeway island at the junction of the 10 and the 110.

After a few choking moments he was able to stand up and breathe; but his heart was pounding, and his left arm, still hot but at least not burning now, was pointed stiffly south. His right palm and the knees of his baggy pants were greenly wet from having crushed the ice plant. Beyond the thickly leaved branches of the bordering oleander bushes, the flickering tracks of car headlights continued to sweep around this enclosed park-like area as they followed the arc of the on-ramp onto the southbound 110.

He ate it, he thought numbly. The kid ate it, or it ate him.

But I’ll eat who’s left.

He had come here to check his ghost traps. The trap right in front of him had caught one, but the ghost seemed to have fled when he had screamed. Sherman Oaks decided to leave the trap here—the ghost would come back to it in a few hours, or else another ghost would come. Sometimes he was able to bottle five or six from just one trap.

He had knocked the trap over when he had fallen, and now he righted it: a hand-lettered cardboard sign that read, SIT ON A POTATO PAN, OTIS. Other traps he had set up in this secret arbor included several more homemade signs—THE NOON SEX ALERT RELAXES NO ONE HT, and GO HANG A SALAMI, I’M A LASAGNA HOG—and scatterings of jigsaw-puzzle pieces on patches of clear dirt. Better-known palindromes, such as Madam, I’m Adam, didn’t catch the attention of the wispy ghosts, and heavier items such as broken dishes seemed to be beyond the power of their frail ectoplasmic muscles to rearrange: but the Potato Pan and the Sex Alert and the Lasagna palindromes kept them confounded for hours, or even days, in wonderment at the way the sentences read the same backward as forward; and the ghosts would linger even longer trying to assemble the jigsaw puzzles.

Real, living homeless people seldom came here, knowing that this isolated patch of greenery was haunted, so he sometimes dropped a big handful of change among the jigsaw pieces—that trick would hold ghosts probably till the end of the world, for they not only felt compelled to put the puzzle together but also to count and stack the money; and apparently their short-term memories were no good, because they always lost count and had to start over. Sometimes, when he arrived with his little glass bottles, the ghosts would faintly ask him for help in counting the coins.

And then he would scoop the ghosts in and stopper the bottles tight. (It was awkward, using just his right hand; but sometimes he had actually seemed able to nudge them along a little with his missing left!) He had always known that he had to use glass containers—the ghosts had to be able to see out, even if it was only as far as the inside lining of a pocket, or they rotted away and turned to poison in the container.

He had his makeshift traps all over the city. In RTD yards under the Santa Monica Freeway, ghosts would climb aboard the doorless old hulks of city buses and then just sit in the seats, evidently waiting for a driver to come and take them somewhere; and they often hung around deserted pay telephones, as if waiting for a call; and sometimes in the empty cracked concrete lots he would just paint a big bull’s-eye, and the things would gather there, presumably to see what sort of missile might eventually hit the target. Even spiderwebs often caught the very new ones.

Sometimes he got so many bottles filled that even his stash boxes wouldn’t hold any more, and he could sell the surplus. The dope dealers that catered to the wealthy Benedict Canyon crowd would pay him two or three hundred dollars per bottle—cash and no questions and not even an excitation test with a magnetic compass, because they had known him long enough to be sure he wouldn’t just sell them an empty bottle. The dealers siphoned each ghost into a quantity of nitrous oxide and then sealed the mix into a little pressurized glass cartridge, and eventually some rich customer would fill a balloon with it and then inhale the whole thing.

The cylinders were known as smokes or cigars, slang terms of the old-timers who attracted ghosts with aromatic pipe tobacco or cherry-flavored cigars, and then inhaled the disintegrating things right along with the tobacco smoke. Take a snort of Mr. Nicotinus, walk with the Maduro Man. It had been considered a gourmet high, in the days before health and social concerns had made tobacco use déclassé. Nitrous oxide was the preferred mixer now, even though the hit tended to be less “digestible,” lumpy with unbroken memories.

Sherman Oaks favored ghosts raw and uncut—not pureed in the bowl of a pipe or the cherry of a cigar, or minced up in a chilled soup of nitrous oxide; he liked them fresh and whole, like live oysters.

He opened his mouth now and exhaled slowly, emptying his lungs, hearing the faint roar of all the ghosts he had eaten over the years or decades.

The Bony Express, all the fractalized trinities of Mr. Nicotinus.

To his left the towers of downtown, among which he could still pick out the old City Hall, the Security Bank building, and the Arco Towers, were featureless and depthless silhouettes against a darkening sky stained bronze by the returned smog. but the cooling evening breeze down here in the freeway island somehow still carried, along with the scents of jasmine and crushed iceplant, a whiff of yesterday’s desert sage smell.

His lungs were empty.

Now Sherman Oaks inhaled deeply—but the kid was too far away. That old gardening truck had apparently kept right on going; he should have got the license number. But his left arm, still uncomfortably warm, was at least pointing toward the nearest loop of the track the kid was leaving. West of here.

The actual flesh-and-blood left arm was gone—lost long ago, he assumed from the smooth, uninflamed scar tissue that covered the stump at the shoulder. The loss of the limb had no doubt been a dramatic incident, but it had happened back in the old life that he knew only through vague and unhelpful fragments of dreams. He couldn’t now even remember what name he might once have had; he had chosen “Sherman Oaks” just because that was the district of Los Angeles he’d been in when awareness had returned to him.

But he still felt a left arm. Sometimes the phantom hand at the end of it would feel so tightly clenched into a fist that the imaginary muscles would cramp painfully, and sometimes the “arm” felt cold and wet. When someone died nearby, though, he felt a little tingle of warmth, as if a cigarette ash had been tapped off onto the phantom skin; and if the ghost was trapped somehow, snagged on or in something, the phantom arm would warm up and point to it.

And even though he knew that there was not really any arm attached to the shoulder, Sherman Oaks found it awkward to walk through doorways or down bus aisles when the phantom limb was thrust out in that way. At other times the missing hand would for whole days at a time seem to be clutching his chest, and he would have to sleep on his back, which he hated to do because he always started snoring and woke himself up.

He squinted around at the darkening grove. He knew he should check the other traps, but he wanted to find the kid before someone else did; obviously Koot Hoomie Parganas had not yet reached puberty—that was why the boy couldn’t absorb the super-smoke that he was overlapped with, even if he had actually inhaled it now. The unabsorbed ghost would continue to be conspicuous.

Sherman Oaks lifted his head at a sudden rustling sound. With muffled cursing and a snapping of oleander branches, someone was clumsily breaking into his preserve. Sherman Oaks tiptoed toward the intruder, but relaxed when he heard the mumbled words: “Goddamn spirochetes can’t hear yourself think in a can of tuna fish. Yo bay-bee! Gotcha where they want ’em if it’s New York minutes in a three-o’clock food show.” And Oaks could smell him, the sharp reek of unmetabolized cheap wine.

Oaks stepped out into a clearing, intentionally stamping his feet. The stranger goggled at him in vast confusion.

“Get out of here,” Oaks told him. “Or I’ll eat you too.”

“Yes, boss,” quavered the stranger, toppling over backward and then swimming awkwardly back toward the oleander border, doing a thrashing backstroke across the ice plant. “Just lookin’ to get my ashes hauled.”

You got your ashes hauled years ago, thought Oaks as he watched the ludicrous figure disappear back onto the freeway shoulder.

But Oaks was uneasy. Even this sort of creature, the creepy old ghosts who had accumulated physical substance—from bugs and sick animals, and spilled blood and spit and jizz, and even from each other, sometimes—might go lurching after the boy, in their idiot intrusive way. They always seemed to find clothes to wear, and they could panhandle for money to buy liquor, but Sherman Oaks could recognize them instantly by their disjointed babbling and the way the liquor, unaffected by their lifeless token guts, bubbled out of their pores still redolent with unmetabolized ethanol.

They couldn’t eat organic stuff, because it would just rot inside them; so they mindlessly ate…rocks, and bottle caps, and marbles, and bits of crumbled asphalt they found in the gutters of old streets. Sherman Oaks had to smile, remembering the time a truck full of live chickens had overturned on the Pasadena Freeway, freeing a couple of dozen chickens who took up messy residence on one of the freeway islands. Passing motorists had started bringing bags of corn along with them on the way to work, and throwing the bags out onto the island as they drove past. Several of the big old solid ghosts had mistaken the corn kernels for gravel, and had eaten them, and then a couple of weeks later had been totally bewildered by the green corn shoots sprouting from every orifice of their squatter’s-rights bodies, even out from behind their eyeballs.

To hell with the ghost traps, thought Sherman Oaks. I can go hungry for one night. I’ve got to track down that kid, and that big unabsorbed ghost, before somebody else does.

THE SKY was purple now, darkening to black, and the Queen Mary was a vast chandelier of lights only a quarter of a mile away across Long Beach Harbor, throwing glittering gold tracks across the choppy water to where Solomon Shadroe stood on the deck of his forty-six-foot Alaskan trawler.

His boat was moored at a slip in the crowded Downtown Long Beach Marina, by the mouth of the Los Angeles River, and though most of the owners of the neighboring boats only rocked the decks on weekends, Shadroe had been a “live-aboard” at the marina for seventeen years. He owned a twenty-unit apartment building near the beach a mile and a half east of here, and even though his girlfriend lived there he hadn’t spent the night on land since 1975.

He swiveled his big gray head back toward the shore. He had no sense of smell anymore, but he knew that something heavy must have happened not too far away—half an hour ago he had felt the punch of a big psychic shift somewhere in the city, even harder than the one that had knocked him down in the alley yesterday evening, when he’d been moving the refrigerator. And all of the stuffed pigs in his stateroom and galley and pilothouse had started burping and kept it up for a full ten minutes, as if their little battery-driven hearts would break.

A few years ago it had rained hard on Halloween night, and he had climbed into his skewed old car and rushed to a Montgomery Ward’s and bought a dozen little stuffed-pig dolls that were supposed to oink if you “GENTLY PET MY HEAD,” as the legend had read on the boxes; actually the sound they made was a prolonged burp. As soon as he had got back to the boat he had pulled them all out of their boxes and stood them on the deck, and they had soaked in the Halloween rain all night. To this day they still had the old-bacon mustiness of Halloween rain.

Now they were his watchdogs. Watchpigs.

Shadroe limped back to the stern transom and stared past the lights of the Long Beach Convention Center, trying to see the towers of Los Angeles.

He had been ashore today, dollying a second used Frigidaire to a vacant apartment on the ground floor of his building—the refrigerator he’d tried to install yesterday had fallen onto his foot, possibly breaking something in his ankle and certainly breaking the refrigerator’s coils, and right there was a hundred dollars blown and the trouble of hiring somebody to take the damned inert machine away—and through an open window in another apartment he had caught a blare of familiar music. It was the theme song of the old fifties situation comedy “Ghost of a Chance,” and when he had stopped to ask the tenant about it he had learned that Channel 13 was running that show again, every afternoon at three—by popular demand.

The sea breeze was suddenly chillier on his immobile face, and he realized that he was crying. He couldn’t taste the tears, but he knew that if he could, they would taste like cinnamon.

One night, and it looked like being soon, he would go ashore and stretch out and take a nap on the beach. Just so there was no one around. He really didn’t want anyone else to get hurt.

AND MILES away to the northwest, out on the dark face of the Pacific, fish were jumping out of the water—mackerel and bonita leaping high in the cold air and slapping back down onto the waves, and sprays of smelt and anchovies bursting up like scattershot; fishermen working the offshore reefs noticed the unusual phenomenon, but being on the surface of the ocean they couldn’t see that the pattern was moving, rolling east across the choppy face of the sea, as if some thing were making its underwater way toward Venice Beach, and the fish were unwilling to share the water with it.

“JESUS, JACKO did you get beat up again?”

Someone was shaking the boy awake, and for a few moments he thought it was his parents, wanting to know what had happened to the friend he’d been playing with that afternoon. “He was swimming in the creek,” he muttered blurrily, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. “And he went under the water and just never came up again. I waited and waited, but it was getting dark, so I came home.” He knew that his parents were upset—horrified?—that he had calmly eaten dinner and gone to bed without even bothering to mention the drowning.

He wanted to explain, but…

“Little man, you might be more trouble than you’re worth.”

A dog was licking the boy’s face—and abruptly, as if across a vast gulf, the boy remembered that the dog’s name was Fred; and then he remembered that his own name was Koot Hootie Parganas, not…Al?

His own memories flooded back, reclaiming his mind. He remembered that this was 1992, and that he was eleven years old, and until last night had lived in Beverly Hills—briefly he saw again the one-armed bum in his parents’ living room, and his parents’ blood-streaked bodies taped into chairs—and he knew that he was sitting in the car that belonged to his new friend, Raffle; and finally he remembered that he had opened his parents’ secret glass vial, and had sniffed whatever had been in it right up into his nose.

His forehead was icy with sudden sweat, and he grabbed the handle of the passenger-side window crank, thinking he was about to throw up; then Fred clambered into the back seat, and leaned between the two front seats to lick Kootie’s cheek again. Oddly, that made the boy feel better. He just breathed deeply, and alternately clenched and opened his hands. Whatever had happened to him was slowing down, tapering off.

“I’m okay,” he said carefully. “Nightmare. Hi, Fred.”

“Hello, Kootie,” said Raffle in a falsetto voice, and after a moment Kootie realized that the man was speaking for the dog. “Fred don’t know to call you Jacko,” explained Raffle in his own voice.

The boy managed a fragile smile.

Memories from a past life? he wondered. Visions? Maybe there was LSD in that vial!

But these were just forlorn, wishful notions. He knew with intimate immediacy what had happened.

He had inhaled some kind of ghost, the ghost of an old man who had lived a long time ago, and Kootie had briefly lost his own consciousness in the sudden onslaught of all the piled-up memories as the old man’s whole life had flashed before Kootie’s eyes. Kootie had not ever watched a playmate drown—that had been one of the earliest of the old man’s memories.

A shout of “Gee-haw!” and the snap of a whip as the driver kept the six-horse team moving, tugging a barge along the Milan canal, and the warm summer breeze up from the busy canal basin reeked of tanning hides and fresh-brewing beer…

Kootie forced the vision down. Milan was the name of a place in Italy, but this had been in…Ohio?

and a caravan of covered wagons, which he knew were about to head west, to find gold in California…

Kootie coughed harshly, spraying blood onto the dashboard.

“Oh, dammit, Jacko. You sick? I don’t need a sick kid…”

“No,” said Kootie, suddenly afraid that the man might order him out of the car right here. “I’m fine.” He leaned forward and swiped at the blood, drops with his sleeve. “Like I said, it was just a nightmare.” He closed his eyes carefully, but the intrusive memories seemed to have trickled to a stop. Only the last few, the chronologically earliest ones, had hit him slowly enough to be comprehensible. “Are we gonna do some more business tonight?”

After a few moments Raffle gave him a doubtful smile. “Well, okay, yeah, I believe we will. After dark, and until ten o’clock, at least, a homeless dad-and-son tableau has gotta be worth booyah, out west of the 405 where the guilty rich folks live. You want to eat?”

Kootie realized that in fact he was very hungry. “Oh, yes, please,” he said.

“Great.” Rattle got out of the car, walked around to the front and lifted the hood. “I trust you like Mexican cuisine,” he called.

“Love it!” Kootie called back, hoping nothing was wrong with the car. His parents had often taken him to Mexican restaurants, though of course they had made sure he ordered only vegetarian things like chiles rellenos, not cooked in lard. He was picturing bowls of corn chips and chunky red salsa on a table, and he wanted to get there very soon.

Now Raffle was coming back and getting inside, but he had not closed the hood, and he was carrying a foil-wrapped package which, Kootie realized when the man sat down and began gingerly unwrapping it, was hot and smelled like chili and cilantro.

“Burritos,” Raffle said. “I buy these cold in the morning and drive around all day with ’em wedged in between the manifold and the carb. Plenty hot by dinnertime.”

Newspapers from underfoot turned out to be informal place mats, and silverware was a couple of plastic forks from the console tray; unlike Raffle’s “pipes,” the forks had obviously not ever been considered disposable.

Kootie made himself stop imagining a hot plate with a couple of enchiladas swimming in red sauce and melted cheese. This burrito was hot, at least; and the spices nearly concealed the faint taste of motor oil and exhaust fumes.

He wondered if the ghostly intruder in his head was aware of the events happening out here in Kootie’s world; and for just a moment he had the impression of…of someone profoundly horrified in a long-feared hell. Kootie found himself picturing walking quickly past a cemetery at night, and being afraid to sleep for more than an hour at a time, and, somehow, sitting crouched on the cowcatcher of an old locomotive racing through a cold night.

Kootie shuddered, and after that he just concentrated on the burrito, and on thwarting the dog’s cheerful interest in the food, and on the shadows on the dark street outside the car windows.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“You may not have lived much under the sea—” (“I haven’t” said Alice)—“and perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster—” (Alice began to say “I once tasted—” but checked herself hastily, and said, “No, never”)—“so you can have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster-Quadrille is!”

—Lewis Carroll,

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

IN Wilmington the glow of dawn was held back by the yellow flares of the Naval Fuel Reserve burn, huge flames gouting out of towering pipes at the top of a futuristic structure of white metal scaffolding and glaring sodium-vapor lights; below it and inland, on the residential streets around Avalon and B Street, shaggy palm trees screened the old Spanish-style houses from some of the all-night glare.

Pete Sullivan tilted a pan of boiling water over his McDonald’s cup and watched the instant-coffee crystals foam brown when the water hit them. When the cup was nearly full he put the pan back on the tiny propane stove and turned off the burner.

As he sipped the coffee, he switched off the overhead light and then pulled back the curtain and looked out through the vans side window at this Los Angeles morning.

The money-scapular was pasted to his sweaty chest, for he hadn’t known this area well enough to sleep comfortably with a window open.

Last night he had driven aimlessly south from his early-evening nap stop at La Cienega Park, and only after he’d found himself getting off the 405 at Long Beach Boulevard did he consciously realize that he must have come down here to look at the Queen Mary.

To put that off, he had resolved to have something good for dinner first, and then had been shocked to find that the Joe Jost’s bar and restaurant on Third Street was gone. He’d made do with a pitcher of beer and a cold ham sandwich at some pizza parlor, disconsolately thinking of the Polish sausage sandwiches and the pickled eggs and the pretzels-with-peppers that Joe Jost’s used to have.

At last he had got back into the van and driven down Magnolia all the way to the empty south end of Queen’s Highway and stopped in the left lane, by the chain-link fence; he had slapped his shirt pocket to be sure he still had the dried thumb in the Bull Durham sack, and then he’d got out and stood on the cooling asphalt and stared through the fence, across the nearly empty parking lot, at the Queen Mary.

Her three canted stacks, vividly red in the floodlights, had stood up behind and above the trees and the fake-Tudor spires of the “Londontowne” shopping area, and he had wondered if Loretta deLarava was at home in her castle tonight.

The breeze had been cold out in the dark by the far fence, but he had been glad of his distance and anonymity—even if deLarava had been standing out on the high port docking wing and looking out this way, she couldn’t have sensed him, not with the thumb in his pocket and the plaster hands in the van right behind him. Houdini’s mask was only in effect draped around him right now; he wasn’t really wearing it, wasn’t a decoy-Houdini as the wearer of the mask was intended to be; but even so the mask would blur his psychic silhouette, fragment it like an image in a shattered mirror.

You’ve hurt my family enough, he had thought at her. Fully, fully enough. Let us rest in peace.

The beer had made him sleepy, and, after eventually getting back in the van, he had driven only a little distance west, across the Cerritos Channel and up Henry Ford Avenue to Alameda, which was called B Street down here in lower Wilmington, before pulling over to a curb and turning the engine off and locking up.

THE RATTLING roar of a low helicopter swept past overhead now, and for an instant he glimpsed the vertical white beam of a searchlight sweeping across the yards and rooftops and alleys. Somewhere nearby a rooster crowed hoarsely, and was echoed by another one farther away.

Sullivan wondered if Los Angeles had ever been really synchronized with the time and space and scale of the real world. Even finding a men’s room, he remembered now as he sipped this first cup of coffee, had often been an adventure. Once in a Chinese restaurant he had trudged down a straight and very long flight of stairs to get to one, and then discovered that a number of doors led out of the tiny, white-tiled subterranean room—he had made sure to remember which doorway he had come in through, so that he wouldn’t leave by the wrong one and wind up in some unknown restaurant or bakery or laundry, blocks from where he had started; and one time in a crowded little low-ceilinged Mexican restaurant on Sixth he had pushed his way through the REST ROOMS door to find himself in a cavernous dark warehouse or something, as big as an airplane hangar, empty except for a collection of old earthmoving tractors in the middle distance—looking behind him he had seen that the restaurant was just a plywood box, attached to the street-side wall, inside the inexplicably enormous room. His Spanish had not been good enough to frame a question about it, and Sukie had been irritably drunk, and when he’d gone back a month or so later the place had been closed.

He lit a cigarette now and wondered if Sukie really had, actually, killed herself.

Remotely he remembered how close the two of them had become—after their father died when they were seven years old—during the years they’d spent in several foster homes. They had never had a “psychic link” or anything like that, but the world was so coldly divided between us two and all of them that the twins could read each other’s moods instantly, even over the phone, and either one of them could unthinkingly and correctly order for the other at any restaurant, and the random letters on passing license plates would always suggest identical words to each of them.

Now Sukie was probably dead, and still his first response to the thought was Good riddance. He was surprised and uncomfortable with the vehemence of the thought.

The twins had begun to differ when they were going to Hollywood High School, and it had become clear that the money their father had left them would be used up before they would finish college in about 1974. Sukie had never been interested in boyfriends, and she resented Pete spending money and time on things like dances. And the girls Pete went out with always dumped him before long, so the whole effort of trying to pursue romances really had seemed like a costly waste.

EEVENTUALLY HE had got a clue to why the girls had always dumped him.

HE AND Sukie had supported themselves through their last years in City College with jobs at pizza parlors and miniature golf courses and pet stores, but even after they’d graduated and got hired by Loretta deLarava for substantial salaries, they had continued to be roommates. Sukie continued to have no interest in the sex that was opposite to her, and Pete had continued to have meager success in pursuing the sex that was opposite to him.

And then in the summer of ’86, Pete had got engaged.

Judy Nording was a film editor who had done postproduction work for deLarava since the late seventies, and Pete had got into the habit of drifting past the editing rooms when she would be working. Somehow he had known that he’d be wise to do this visiting when Sukie was off on some solo errand.

Judy had been two years younger than Pete, but she had made him feel naive and stodgy and incurious—she not only knew everything about editing and mixing, but also knew nearly as much as he did about lights and colored gels and generator trucks and on-site electrical problems. And she was tall and slim, and when he strolled into her office she had a casual way of shoving her chair back and throwing one long blue-jeaned leg over the editing bench, with her ankle between the rewind posts, and the tight denim that sheathed her calf glowing in the glare from the light well. Her long blond hair was generally tied back in a braid.

He had been fascinated when she’d shown him things like the xenon-gas projection bulbs that worked under eight atmospheres of pressure, and that burned so hot that they reconfigured ordinary air into ozone which had to be piped up through the ceiling by exhaust fans; and she had taken him down to the wide Foley stage in front of the screen in the projection room, and shown him the dozen floor-sections that could be lifted away to expose yards-wide movable wooden trays, so that the actors who were dubbing English dialogue onto foreign movies could audibly plod through sand while they spoke their lines onto the new soundtrack, or walk clickingly over marble, or even, if the last partition was lifted away, slosh noisily through a pool of water.

She had lived with half-a-dozen other young people in an old three-story Victorian house off Melrose, near the studio; even in ’86 the house and yard had been fenced in with chain-link and barbed wire. Eventually Judy had given Pete a key to the front gate.

Sukie had been furious when he first spent the night there—but as it became clear that her brother and Judy Nording were actually likely to get married, Sukie had apparently changed her mind about the woman, taking her out for “girl-lunches” and shopping expeditions.

Pete had been naively pleased that the two women were getting along, and he was seeing Judy every night.

Then one evening at Miceli’s, an Italian restaurant off Hollywood Boulevard, Judy had been inexplicably cold and abrupt with him; he had not been able to demand or plead or wheedle the reason from her, and after he had sulkily driven her home and gone back to his and Sukie’s apartment, he had shut himself into his room with a bottle of Sukie’s Wild Turkey bourbon and had laboriously and painstakingly written a maudlin sonnet to his suddenly hostile fiancée. At about two in the morning he had opened the door, thrown all the drafts of the sonnet into the kitchen wastebasket, and lurched off to bed.

The next morning he had been awakened at about ten by intermittent laughter, and a harsh voice droning on and on, outside his bedroom window, in the alley; but he had not, opened his eyes and dragged himself out of bed until he had recognized the lines the voice was reciting. Then, his face cold with nausea and disoriented horror, he had reeled to the window and squinted out.

Apparently Sukie had taken out the trash.

Some ragged old man had found the drafts of Pete’s sonnet in the Dumpster and, in mock-theatrical tones and with exaggerated grimacings, was reading the verses to an audience of about half a dozen unkempt men and women, who were bracing themselves on their shopping carts to keep from falling down with laughter.

Pete hadn’t been able to work up the peremptory tone to tell them to go away, and neither could he bear to go back to bed and listen to more of the recital, so he had defeatedly set about showering and shaving and making coffee. He had eventually got to deLarava’s studio at about noon—to discover that Judy Nording had quit. When he rushed to her house he was told that she had packed up her bed and stereo and books in a U-Haul trailer and had simply driven away. By nightfall he had established that none of her friends, nor even her parents in Northridge, would admit to knowing where she might have gone.

Upon hearing of it, Sukie had denounced Nording as a teasing, fickle bitch and probable sociopath; and under her indignation she had been obviously pleased and relieved.

In November, Pete had located Judy Nording—she’d been working for a news station in Seattle, and he had flown up there and surprised her on her front doorstep one rainy evening when she was returning from the studio. She had burst out sobbing at the sight of him, and he had walked her to a bar across the street. Over a calming gin-and-tonic she had stiffly apologized for disappearing the way she had done, but insisted that she had had no choice, after finding out about his previous marriages, and his children and his bisexuality. Sukie had told her all of it, Nording had assured him—Sukie had taken her to one last lunch and had shown her the wedding announcements, pictures of the many kids, and had even brought along a man who’d been one of Pete’s ill-treated gay lovers: Sukie, Nording explained, had felt that she ought to know.

NOW, SITTING on the narrow bed in his van six years later, Sullivan winced as he remembered that he had not been able to convince Nording that Sukie’s stories had been lies. It hadn’t really mattered anymore for Nording was by that time involved with some guy at the station, and Pete himself had begun dating a young woman who worked in a Westwood restaurant—but though he had laughed, and spoken earnestly, and shouted, and thrown a handful of change onto the table and waved at the telephone, during the course of a long half hour in that Seattle bar, he had not been able to convince Judy Nording that he really was single, childless, and heterosexual.

Pete had been glad Sukie hadn’t gone on to attribute to him something like heroin dealing, or murder, for Nording would probably have believed those things too, and called the police on him.

He had flown back down to Los Angeles later that night. Nothing about the scene he’d then had with Sukie in their shared apartment had gone the way he had indignantly planned. Sukie had cried, and told him why she had chased Judy away, and, hanging on to his jacket sleeve as he struggled toward the front door, had kept on telling him.

HE GULPED the last of the hot coffee, and decided against another cup. Sukie had always had a couple of cups of coffee first thing in the morning, and then followed them with two or three cold beers “to keep anything from catching up.”

He could see now that Sukie had been an alcoholic by the time they’d got out of college in ’75. By the early eighties, when the twins had been working for Loretta deLarava for a while, they had been known to some of their friends as “Teet and Toot”—Pete was “Teet,” for teetotaler, and Sukie was “Toot” for off-on-a-toot.

He was sure that he must have tried on a number of occasions to talk her into at least cutting back on her drinking, but this morning he could remember only one time. During a break at a shoot somewhere in Redondo Beach, years before she would wreck his engagement to Judy Nording, he had timidly suggested that one more slug from her bourbon-filled thermos bottle might be enough for the day, or at least for the rest of the morning, and she had said, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” She had given him a strange look then—a sort of doubtful smile, with her eyebrows hiked up in the center and down at the outer edges, as if affectionately forgiving him for having asked a naively rude question, one that could have elicited a devastating answer.

He stubbed his cigarette out in a little tin ashtray on the narrow sink, then stood up and pulled his pants on. Later today he’d have to get a shower in some college gym, but right now he wanted to find some early breakfast at a place with an accessible men’s room…and then have a look around the city.

He put on his shoes and a shirt and ducked between the front seats to pull back the windshield curtain. The windows of the houses on this street were still dark, though the dawn was beginning to fade the orange glow of the flares crowning the Naval Fuel Reserve.

As he sat down in the driver’s seat and switched on the engine, he was suddenly, deeply certain that Sukie had indeed killed herself three nights ago. His heartbeat didn’t speed up, and all he did was light another cigarette as he fluttered the gas pedal to keep the cold engine running, but quietly and all at once he had realized that for decades she had been wanting to be dead—maybe ever since their father died, in 1959.

A.O.P., dude. Accelerate Outta Problems. She hadn’t exactly accelerated out of that one. It had taken her thirty-two years.

And now Sukie was a ghost. Sullivan hoped she would rest quietly and asleep, and not be searched out and snorted up by some East Coast deLarava, nor stay up, awake and agitated, and eventually grow by slow accretion into one of the lurching, imbecilic creatures such as he had seen at the Houdini ruins yesterday.

He let off on the gas pedal. The engine seemed to be running smoothly. He turned on the lights, squinted at the green radiance of the gauges, then clanked the engine into gear and nosed the van away from the curb into the still street. May as well head up to Sunset and see if Tiny Naylor’s is still there, he thought.

IN THE Greyhound bus station on Seventh, Angelica Anthem Elizalde stood by the glass doors off to the street side of the ticket counter, down at the end where the word BOLETOS was printed very big over the small word TICKETS on the overhead sign.

For the last several hours she had tried to nap in one or another of the cage like chairs, or peered out the doors at the empty nighttime street, or paced the shiny linoleum floor while humbled families gathered around Gate 8, to eventually all pile aboard some bus bound for God knew where, and then after half an hour or so be replaced by more shuffling, apologetic, fugitive families. Their luggage was old thrift-store suitcases, and cardboard boxes hastily sealed with glossy brown tape, and woven-nylon sausage bags so stained that they might plausibly have contained actual sausages; Elizalde kept expecting to see goats on rope leashes, too, and wicker cages full of live chickens.

After some time she had convinced herself that the hands of the clock on the wall did move, but she had been wearily sure that they moved with supernatural slowness. Without believing it very much at all, she had played with the thought that she had died on the bus, that the jolt that had waked her up as they’d been passing through Victorville had been a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and everything she had experienced since that moment was only after-death hallucination; in that case yesterday’s eerie sensation of momentarily anticipating events had probably been pre-stroke phenomena. This fluorescently bright bus station boarding area, with its cage-chairs and its chrome-and-tile restrooms and its jarringly jaunty posters of rocketing buses, would be the antechamber of Hell. This night would never end, and eventually she would defeatedly join one of the crowds of departing families and go away with them to whatever lightless tenements and government-project housing Hell consisted of. (She could offer her apologies to Frank Rocha in discorporate person.)

But now, standing by the glass doors that faced Seventh, she could see that the sodium-yellow-stained blackness of the sky had begun to glow a deep blue in the east; white lights shone now in the liquor store across the street—presumably the employees were preparing for the dawn rush—and a couple of the hotel-room windows above the store were luminous amber rectangles. Los Angeles was wearily getting up, she thought, shambling to the bathroom, lip-smacking the false teeth into place, strapping on the prosthetic limbs…

A whisper of cool breeze breathed between the aluminum doorframes into the stale atmosphere of the bus station, and somehow even down here south of Beverly and west of the L.A. River, it carried a scent of newly opened morning glories.

The day, the staring Western day, is born, she thought. Awake, for morning in the bowl of night/ has fired the shot that puts the stars to flight.

She jumped, and then the public-address speakers snapped on to announce another departure.

With a rueful sigh she abandoned the notion that she was dead. Another few cups of vending-machine coffee; and then it would be time to start walking.

LOBSTERS AND crabs had begun crawling out of the Venice Beach surf at dawn.

Under the brightening tangerine and spun-metal sky, the streets were still in dimness, and for a silent few moments at six-thirty a ripple of deeper shadows stepped across the uneven city blocks as the streetlights sensed the approaching day and one by one winked out. NO PARKING signs had kept the curbs of Main and Pacific clear all night, but on the side streets, and in the tiny dirt lots between houses, cars sat parked at whatever crooked angles had let them fit, and motorcycles leaned on their kick-stands right up against walls and fence posts and car fenders.

On the rust-streaked walls of the old buildings, the little iron diamonds of earthquake-reinforcement bolts studded the old stucco. The painted Corinthian columns of the porticoed shop fronts facing Windward Avenue were faded in the half-light, and the littered expanse of the street was empty except for an occasional shapeless figure trudging along or stolidly pushing a trash-filled shopping cart. Occasional early-morning joggers, always flanked by at least one bounding dog, scuffed down the middle of the street toward the open lots facing the narrow lane that was Ocean Front Walk.

The lots were ringed with empty metal-pipe frameworks and cages that would be occupied with vendors’ booths later in the morning, and the only color in the scene now was the vividly shaded and highlighted graffiti that was gradually engulfing the once-red Dumpsters lined up against the building walls.

Out past the stark volleyball poles and the cement bike trails was the open beach, not taking clear footprints now but showing clearly the sharp broken-star prints of bird feet and the crumble-edged footprints of joggers who had been out when the dew had still clung to the sand.

The waves were low and the blue ocean stretched out to the brightening horizon, undimmed by any fog. A jet rising steeply into the sky from LAX to the south was a dark splinter, with a point of white light at the wingtip shining as bright as Venus in the dawn sky. Fishing boats moved past in the middle distance as silently and slowly as the minute hand of a watch, and a fat pelican bobbed on the waves a hundred yards offshore.

And crabs and lobsters were climbing over the sprawled and trailing piles of coppery kelp. Seagulls shouted and glided low over the spectacle, their cries ringing emptily in the chilly air, and sandpipers swiveled their pencil beaks and high-stepped away along the surf edge. A shaggy golden retriever and a Great Dane had stopped to bark at the armored animals who had come clambering and antennae-waving up the sand, and the owners of the dogs stopped to peer and back away. More lobsters and crabs were tumbling up in the low waves, and the ones who had come out first were already up above the flat brown dampness and were floundering in the dry sand. A John Deere tractor had been chugging up the beach from the direction of the pier and the lifeguard headquarters, dragging a leveler across the night-randomized dunes and gullies, but the driver had put the engine into neutral and let the tires drag to a halt when he noticed the leggy exodus.

Then a wave began to mount, out on the face of the water.

It was a green hump against the horizon, rather than a line, more like the bow-swell of an invisible tanker aiming to make landfall here than a wave rolling in to crash indiscriminately along the whole length of the Santa Monica Bay coastline. Only when the pelican was lifted on it, and squawked and spread his wings at his sudden elevation, did the people on the beach look up, and then they hastily moved back up the flat beach toward the gray monolith of the Recreation Center.

The tall green swell grew taller, seeming to gather up all the visible water as it swept silently toward the shore. As the wave crested, and finally began to break apart into spray at the curling top edge and roaringly exhale as it leaned forward against the resistance of the air, a long form was visible rolling inside the solid water—and when the wave boomingly crashed on the sand, surged far up the slope in hissing foam and then was sucked away back to the receding sea, a big steely thing had been left behind on the brown, bubbling sand.

It shifted and settled, and then didn’t move.

It was a fish. That much was agreed upon by the half-dozen people who timidly approached after the thing had lain inert on the sand for a full minute and no further big waves gathered out at sea—but the fish was twenty or thirty feet long and as thick as a thigh-high stack of mattresses, and its body and head were covered with bony plates rather than scales. No one in the knot of spectators could even guess what species it might be. It appeared to be dead, but it looked so like some monster from the pages of an illustrated book on the Cretaceous period that no one approached the thing within twenty feet. Even the dogs stayed away from it, and made do with bounding away to bark busily at the fleeing lobsters and crabs.

For a while, water leaked out of the fish’s blunt face from between its open, armored jaws, but now there was no motion at all to the creature.

An old woman in a parka stared for a while, then backed away from the big and vaguely repulsive spectacle. “I’ll go get someone,” she said querulously. “A lifeguard, or someone.”

“Yeah,” called a young man. “Maybe he can do CPR on it.”

Up the slope, on the dry sand closer to the sidewalks and the handball courts and the sea-facing row of shops and cafes and blocky old apartment buildings, the panicky crabs and lobsters were turning in disoriented circles and waving their claws in the air.