In this moment of unprepared insight, while his bones shivered with an icy chill in spite of the hot air and the sweat on his face, he was bleakly sure he would not have thought of it, or would at least have contrived to set the lens up incorrectly. He wouldn’t be able to do it wrong now, now that he was aware of the temptation. But maybe it still won’t work! The thought was almost a prayer.
Kootie limped forward and held his right hand up to Bradshaw. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Bradshaw,” he said. “I’m two people at the moment—one of ’em is known as Kootie—”
“That’s an I-ON-A-CO belt you got on,” said Bradshaw, shaking the boy’s hand “They don’t work. You got it from Wilshire?”
“We were on Wilshire,” said the boy in a surprised tone, and it occurred to Sullivan that this was the first time the voice had really sounded like a little boy’s “Right by MacArthur Park!”
“I meant H. Gaylord Wilshire himself,” said Bradshaw. “That was his original tract. From Park View to Benton, and Sixth down to Seventh. My godfather bought one of those fool belts. From him, in the twenties. What’s old man Wilshire like these days?”
“Insubstantial,” said the boy, and his voice was controlled and hard again. “But I didn’t get to introduce my other self.” He looked around at the other three people in the room. “I’m Thomas Alva Edison,” he said, “and I promise you I can get your ghost telephone working, even if Petey here can’t.”
Sullivan was relieved that everyone was staring at the boy now, and he went back to the refrigerator and took the second-last beer and popped it open. I shouldn’t have said condensing lens, he thought bitterly. I should have blinked at her in surprise, and then acted insulted. Edison. I’m sure. No doubt the kid is a ghost, or has one on him, but I’ll bet every ghost that knows anything about electricity claims to have been Thomas Edison.
“Cart all your crap to my office,” said Bradshaw wearily. “You can set up your gizmo there. It’s the most masked room in this whole masked block. Electric every which way, water running uphill and roundabout—even hologram pictures in a saltwater aquarium under black light. And bring your bag of fried chicken, Mr. Edison—Johanna loves that stuff. Did you get Original Recipe—or the new crunchy stuff?”
“Original Recipe,” said Elizalde over her shoulder as she stepped past Sullivan and opened the refrigerator.
“Good,” said Bradshaw. “That’s what she likes. I hope you brought enough.”
AN HOUR later Sullivan was sitting cross-legged on the dusty rug in Bradshaw’s dim office, staring idly at the featureless white glow of the old man’s TV screen and gnawing a cold chicken wing.
Bradshaw’s “honey pie,” a heavy young woman in tight leotards and a baggy wool sweater, had burst in shortly after they’d carried all the supplies to the office, and after the introductions (Johanna, this is Thomas Edison—Mr. Edison, my honey pie Johanna) she had told Bradshaw that “the pigs on the boat were just burping, not smoking yet.”
After that, Johanna and Elizalde had gone out again in Bradshaw’s car to buy supplies—bandages, hydrogen peroxide, a secondhand portable movie projector, a pint of tequila for Elizalde, more beer and more Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a box of sidewalk chalk, which Kootie had insisted on.
When they had got back Elizalde had cleaned the cut in Kootie’s side and secured it with the bandages and put on a more expert-looking dressing, and then they had i torn open the KFC bags.
The chicken was now gone, and Sullivan had had several of the beers. He tossed the chicken bone onto his newspaper place mat and took a sip of his latest beer. “Angelica,” he said, “could you pass me that muffin?” Elizalde looked at him coldly. “Why do you call it a muffin?” He stared back at her. “Well, it’s…a little round thing made out of dough.” “So’s your head, but I don’t call it a muffin. This is a roll.” She picked it up and leaned across the newspapers to hold it out. “Don’t get drunk for this,” she added. “Keep the roll,” he said. “I had my heart set on a muffin.”
“I wish I could get drunk,” said Bradshaw grumpily. He had crunched up a succession of red cinnamon balls as the others had passed around the chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy, and now he poured himself another glass of whatever it was that he was drinking—some red fluid that also reeked of cinnamon. “My pigs and TV are useless while Mr. Edison’s here.”
Sullivan had decided not to ask about the smoking pigs, but he waved his beer at the white-glowing television. “What’re you watching?”
“Channel Two,” said Bradshaw, “CBS, my old alma mater.”
Til bet I could mess with it and get you a better picture.” Sullivan felt tightly tensed, as if any move he made would break something in the cluttered office.
“It’s not on for the picture,” wheezed Bradshaw. “Ghosts are an electrical brouhaha in the fifty-five-megahertz range—and Channel Two is the—closest channel to that. The brightness control on that set is—turned all the way to black, right now—believe it or not.”
“That’s awfully shortwave,” commented the boy who claimed to be Edison. “You’re a shortwave critter,” Bradshaw said. “And a damn big one. Even if you were a dozen miles away—you’d still show up—on the screen here as a—white band. But standing here you’re hogging the whole show. We could have the ghost of—goddamn Godzilla standing right outside, and I wouldn’t have a clue.” “Don’t you people have a telephone to build?” asked Elizalde. Sullivan looked irritably across the newspapers at her—but then with a flush of sympathy he realized that she was as tense as he was. He remembered how she had bravely pretended to be eager to go witchcraft-shopping this morning, when he had been ready to sit holed up in the apartment all weekend; and for a moment, before he sighed and got to his feet, he felt a flicker of pitying love for her, and of disgust with himself.
“Yeah,” he said. “Household current should be enough—I bought a train-set transformer, and there’s the Ford coil.”
Elizalde had got up too, and was lifting candles and herb packets and tiny bottles of oil out of her shopping bag.
“What did you have in mind?” asked Kootie, who was sitting crouched like a bird up on the back of the old couch. “Let’s be speedy, it’s less than twelve hours to midnight, and I want to be clathrated damn deep, out of range of any magnets, when church bells are ringing the first strokes of Halloween.”
“You’re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer, you won’t dissolve! I’ll race you into the water!” It had been a man’s voice that had said it, calling happily. Sullivan remembered the two Coke cans he had dropped on the floor back in the apartment, and he didn’t want to remember whose voice it had been that had said, “I’ll race you into the water!”
“A bulb with a carborundum button instead of a filament,” he said loudly, “charged, with the eventual brush of electric discharge…focused through a goddamn condensing lens…onto the quartz filament, which we’ll blacken with soot, inside a Langmuir gauge. It’ll work like the vanes in a radiometer, wiggle in response to the light coming through the lens. We can break a thermometer to get a drop of mercury to put in the gauge, and then we can evacuate it to a good enough rarefication with a hose connected to the sink faucet….”