Expiration Date (45 page)

By the time he had walked halfway down the ramp toward the canal-bank level, he had left behind the gasping sea breeze and all of the sounds of the beach-city traffic, and all he could hear was bees in the bushes and wind chimes and a distant grumbling of ducks.

He had never cared to read up on this particular seaside town, but from things people had said over the years he had gathered that it had been built in the first years of the century as a mock-up of the original Italian Venice; the canals had been more extensive then, and there had even been gliding gondolas poled by gondoliers with Italian accents. The notion hadn’t caught on, though, and the place had fallen into decrepitude, and in the years after World War II it had been a seedy, shacky beatnik colony, with rocking oil pumps between the houses on the banks of the stagnating canals.

He was walking along the sidewalk now, and he’d gone far enough so that he could look down the cross canal. Another footbridge arched over the blue-sky-reflecting
water in that direction, framed by tall palm trees, and a solider-looking bridge farther down looked as though it could accommodate cars.

City-planning types had moved to have the canals filled in, but the residents had protested effectively, and the canals were saved. The neat brickwork of the banks was clearly a modern addition, and many of the houses had the stucco anonymity or the custom Tudor look of new buildings, though there were still dozens of the old, comfortably weather-beaten California bungalow-style houses set in among ancient untrimmed palm trees and overhanging shingle roofs.

Two women and a collie were walking toward him along the sidewalk he was on, and though neither of the women looked particularly like the pictures he’d seen of Elizalde; he dug with his free hand into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out one of the lightbulbs and the paper 7-Eleven bag.

Sullivan noticed a brown plastic owl on a fence post, and it reminded him that he had seen another one on a roof peak behind him. Ahead, now, he spied still another, swinging on a string from a tree branch. And he could hear several sets of jangling wind chimes—maybe Elizalde was right about ghosts being drawn to places like this, and the residents had set out these things as scarecrows. Scareghosts.

“Afternoon,” he said as he passed the ladies and the dog.

When they were behind him he slid the lightbulb into the bag and crouched over the pavement. He glanced back at the two women, and then swung the bag in an arc onto the cement, popping the bulb.

Both of the women jumped in surprise—
right after
the noise.

“Excuse me,” he said sheepishly, nodding and waving at them.

He straightened and kept walking, tucking the jingling bag back into his pocket.

The white-painted wooden footbridge was steep, and he paused at the crest to shift the Houdini hands to his left side. He was sweating, and wishing now that he’d left the things in the van.

The water below him was clear, and he could see rocks in it but no fish. There had been fish—

H
E WAS
halfway up the sidewalk of the branch canal, staring at a bleached steer skull on the wall of an old wooden house (another scareghost!), and he had no recollection of having descended from the bridge or walking this far up.

Aside from the two women he had seen, who had since disappeared, there seemed to be no one out walking along the canals this afternoon. He looked around. Even the houses all seemed to have been evacuated—he hadn’t even seen a cat. (His heart was knocking inside his chest.) The water was too still, the houses by the canal were too low, crouching under the tall legs of the palm trunks, and the silence wasn’t
nice
anymore—it was the silence of a dark yard when all the crickets suddenly stop chirping at once.

Elizalde wasn’t here, and he didn’t want to meet whatever might be.

Without noticing it he had already passed the footbridge on this canal branch, but the wider bridge was still ahead of him, and as he started toward it he saw a car mount it from the islanded side, pause at the crest, and then nose down the far slope-slowly, for the arch was so steep that the driver couldn’t be able to see the pavement ahead of him.

Just A.O.P., dude, Sullivan thought.

He was clutching the plaster hands with both of his own hands as he walked now, and it was all he could do not to break into a run. He didn’t look back to make sure nothing was crawling out of the canal behind him, because he was sure that if he did, he would have to
keep on
looking back as he fled this place, would have to
walk backward
toward the bridge that led away to the normal city channels that were asphalt and not water, and something would manifest itself ahead of him, and then just wait for him to back into it.

His eyebrows itched with sweat, and he was breathing fast and shallow.

This is just a funk, he thought, a fit of nerves. There are other canals here
(Are there?)
and Elizalde might be on the sidewalk of the next one over, or the one beyond that; she might be stark naked and waving her arms and riding a goddamn
unicycle,
but you won’t see her because you’re panicking here.

So be it. She couldn’t have helped me anyway. I’ll find
some other
way to warn my father’s ghost (this trip out here was an idiotic long shot) after I drive out of this damned town and find a place to relax and chug a couple of fast, cold beers.

His right shoulder was brushing against vines and bricks as he strode toward the bridge, and he realized that he was crowding the fences of the houses, avoiding the bank—horrified, in fact, at the thought of falling into the shallow water.

the way all sounds echo like metallic groans underwater

He must have just dropped the plaster hands. He was running, and his unimpeded hands were clenched into fists, pumping the air as his legs pounded under him. From the shoulder of his jacket he heard a snap, and then another, as if stitches were being broken.

At the foot of the bridge he stopped, and let his breathing slow down. This bridge was part of a street, Dell Street, and he could hear cars sighing past on South Venice Boulevard ahead. Even if something audibly swirled the water of the canal now, he felt that he could sprint and be in the middle of the boulevard before his first squirted tears of fright would have had time to hit the pavement.

With a careful, measured tread he walked up the slope of the bridge, and he paused at the crest. Ahead of him on the right side of the street was the grandest yet of the neo-Tudor buildings, a place with gables and stained-glass windows and an inset tower with antique chimney pots on its shingled funnel roof. He was wondering if it might be a restaurant, with a bar and a men’s room, when in the bright stillness he heard something splashing furtively in the water under the bridge.

All he did was exhale all the air out of his lungs, and then rest his hands on the coping of the bridge and look down over the edge.

T
HERE WAS
someone crouched down there, beside a small white fiberglass rowboat that had been drawn up onto the gravel slope beside the bridge abutment; the figure was wearing a tan jumpsuit and a many-colored knitted tarn that concealed the hair, but Sullivan could see by the flexed curve of the hips and the long legs that it was a woman. Blinking and peering more closely, he saw that the woman wasn’t looking at the boat, but at the barred storm drain that the boat was moored to. She was swirling her hand in the water and calling softly through the grating, as if to someone in the tunnel on the other side of the steel bars.

“Frank?” she said. “Frank, don’t hide from me.”

Sullivan’s heart was pounding again, and belatedly he wondered if he had
really
wanted to find this Elizalde woman.

For that had to be who this was. Still, he silently reached up to his coat pocket (the pocket flap felt rough, like cloth instead of leather) and fished out a lightbulb. Holding it by the threaded metal base, he swung the glass bulb at the stone coping of the bridge.

“Yah!”
shouted the woman below, scrambling up and splashing one foot into the water; and the bulb popped against the coping.

She turned a scared glance up at him, and a moment later she had ducked under the bridge, out of his sight.

“Wait!” yelled Sullivan, hurrying down the landward slope of the bridge. “Doctor—” No, he thought, don’t yell her last name out here, that won’t reassure her. “Angelica!”

She had splashed under the bridge and was back up in the sunlight on the bank on the west side, striding away from him, obviously ready to break into a run at any sound of pursuit. A couple of ducks on the bank hurried into the water, out of her way.

“We can help each other!” he called after her, not stepping down from the bridge onto the sidewalk. “Please, you’re trying to get in touch with this Frank guy, and I need to get in touch with my father!” She was still hurrying away, her long legs taking her farther away with every stride. She wouldn’t even look back. “Lady,” Sullivan yelled in despair,
“I need your help!”

That at least stopped her, though she still didn’t turn around.

He opened his mouth to say something else, but she spoke first, in a low, hoarse voice that carried perfectly to his ears but would probably have been inaudible ten feet back: “Go away. My help is poison.”

Here I am in Venice Beach, he thought. “Well, so’s mine. Maybe we cancel out.”

When she turned around she was pushing the knitted cap back from her face, and then she rubbed her hand down her forehead and jaw as if she had a headache or was very tired. “You know who I am,” she said. “Don’t say
your
name here, and don’t say mine again.” She waved him to silence when he opened his mouth, then went on, “You can follow me to the big parking lot, if you like. Don’t get close to me.”

She walked back, past the foot of the bridge, and started up Dell Street, walking next to the slack-rope fence of the white Tudor house Sullivan had thought was a restaurant. When she had passed it and was halfway to the stop sign at South Venice, he started forward from the bottom of the bridge.

After a few steps, he stopped in confusion and looked down at his own legs.

He was wearing…someone else’s pants, somehow. Instead of the blue jeans he had pulled on in the gym at City College this morning, he was wearing formal gray wool trousers. With cuffs. He crouched to touch them, and two more snaps popped loose from the sleeve of his coat, and then the sleeve was disattached, hanging down over his hand. The sleeve was wool too—he slapped dizzily at his sides—the whole garment was, and it was a suit coat. He couldn’t help looking back, to see if his leather jacket might somehow be lying on the bridge behind him. It wasn’t.

He pulled the sleeve off with his other hand. The upper edge was hemmed, with metal snaps sewed on. He gripped the cuff of the other sleeve and tugged, and that sleeve came off too, with a popping of snaps. (He noted that he was now wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, no longer the plaid flannel he remembered.) The coat was convertible, it could be worn with the sleeves long or short.

Why, he wondered, would anyone want a short-sleeved formal coat?

Well, it occurred to him, a magician might. To show that he didn’t have anything up his sleeves. Houdini was a magician, wasn’t he? Maybe I didn’t lose the mask after all—maybe I’m wearing it.

He breathed deeply, and watched the ducks paddling out across the water. He was still nervous, but the sense of imposed isolation, of being the only moving thing on a microscope slide, had moved on past him.

He looked at his hands, and in the middle of this dream-logic afternoon he wasn’t very surprised, or even very scared, to see (though the sight did speed up his heartbeat) that his hands were different. The fingers were thicker, the nails trimmed rather than bitten, and the thumbs were longer. There were a few small scars on the knuckles, but the scars he remembered were gone.

He lifted the hands and ran the fingers through his hair, and immediately his arms tingled with goose bumps: for his hair felt kinky and wiry, not straight and fine as it normally did. But it was falling back into limp strands as he disordered it, and he could now feel again the constriction of creased leather around his elbows.