As his fingers and brain followed the inevitable chessboard logic of potentials and resistances and magnetic fields, Sullivan’s mind was a ringing ground zero after the detonation of his hitherto-entombed memories, with frightened thoughts darting among the raw, broken ruins of his psyche.
I was there when he drowned! The Christmas shoot in ‘86 was not the first time I was ever at Venice Beach—no wonder I kept seeing deja-vu sunlit overlays of the Venice scene projected onto those gray winter streets and sidewalks. I had been there when he drowned on that summer day in ‘59, and Loretta deLarava is Kelley Keith, our stepmother, and she killed him, she poisoned him and watched my father die! I was there—I watched my father die! At least Sukie tried to swim out and save him—I gave up, ran away, back to the towels.
O car-bolic faithless, he sang in his head, echoing Sukie’s old misremembered Christmas carol.
He was suddenly sure that Sukie had all along remembered some of that day, possibly a lot of it. Her drinking C What you can’t remember cant hurt you)“, her celibacy, and her final feverish attempt to force Pete into bed and have sex with him after he had confronted her with the lies she had told to Judy Nording—even her eventual suicide—must, it seemed to him now as he screwed the Ford coil onto the surface of the desk, have been results of her remembering that day.
By midafternoon the assembly had been wired and screwed down and propped up across the desktop, and the carborundum bulb was plugged in. Edison pointed out that when the evacuated bulb warmed up, the line of its brushy interior discharge would be sensitive to the motion of any person in the room, so they ran wires around the doorway and into Bradshaw’s little fluorescent-lit kitchen, and set up the chalk-cylinder speaker assembly on the counter by the sink, with a rewired old telephone on a TV table in the middle of the floor. Sullivan had ceremoniously slid a kitchen chair up in front of it.
Elizalde had made a steaming, eye-watering tea of mint leaves and tequila in a saucepan on the old white-enameled stove, and had turned off the flame when all the liquid had boiled away and the leaves had cooked nearly dry. She and Johanna were standing by the stove, hemmed in by the wires trailing across the worn linoleum floor.
Elizalde’s eyes were big and empty when she looked up at Sullivan, and he thought he must look the same way. “When you’re ready,” she said, “Johanna and I will go light the candles in the other room, and splash the vente aquí oil around. Then we should disconnect any smoke alarms, and I’ll turn on this stove burner again, high, under this pot of yerra vuena. You want to be talking into the smoke from it.”
Sullivan had been making sure to take each emptied beer can to the trash before furtively opening the next, so that Elizaide wouldn’t be able to count them. O rum key, O ru-um key to O-bliv-ion, he sang shrilly in his head.
He took the latest beer into the office, which was very dark now that Bradshaw had unplugged the television set and carried it out to one of the garages, and he pried the can open quietly as he checked the discharge in the carborundum bulb. The bulb had indeed warmed up, and the ghostly blue wisp of electrons was curling against the inside of the glass, silently shifting its position as he moved across the carpet.
“I guess we’re ready,” he said, sidling back into the bright lit kitchen past Bradshaw, who was standing in the doorway.
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE
“She must be sent as a message by the telegraph—”
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
I don’t remember the old man’s number,” Bradshaw said. “We could call the reference desk at a library, from a regular phone, I guess.”
“I know the number,” said Sullivan.
Running and running, he thought, running with Sukie since 1959, and then running extra fast and alone since 1986. All over the country. To wind up here, now, in this shabby kitchen, staring at a gutted old black bakelite telephone. “It’s April Fool’s Day, 1898.”
He looked at Elizalde. “My father’s birthday. That and his full name will be his telephone number.” He looked down at the rotary dial on the telephone. The old man would be summoned by dialing April the first, 1898, A-RT-H-U-R—P-A-T-R-I-C-K—S-U-L-L-I-V-A-N.
Slowly, looking at the rotary dial, he read off, “411898, 278487-7287425-78554826.”
“A lot of numbers,” said Kootie, and Sullivan thought it might actually be the boy talking.
“It’s very long distance,” he said.
“I remember I always thought God’s phone number was Et cum spiri 2-2-oh,” said Elizalde nervously. “From the Latin mass, you know? Et cum spiritu tuo.”
“You can call Him after I’m done talking to my dad.”
“Can magical calls out of here be traced?” asked Bradshaw suddenly.
Kootie cleared his throat. “Sure,” he said. The boy was sitting up on the kitchen counter beside the chalk cylinder, which had been mounted on the stripped frame of an electric pencil sharpener; he was pale, and his narrow chest was rising and falling visibly. Sweat was running in shiny lines down over his stomach, and the bandage over his ribs on the right side was spotted with fresh blood. “You’ve got—what, three? four?—antennas sitting around in this kitchen, and they do broadcast as well as receive.”
“Don’t worry, Nicky,” said Sullivan, “we’ll use a scrambler. Angelica, could I have Houdini's thumb?” When she had dug the thing out of her shoe and passed it to him, he laid it on the table beside the telephone. “We can dial with this.”
“It would be good if we could make a test call first,” Kootie said thoughtfully. “Anybody got any dead people they got to get a message to?”
Visibly tensing before she moved, Elizalde stepped forward away from the stove, placing her sneakers carefully among the looped wires, and sat down in the chair. “There’s a guy I took money from,” she said steadily, “and I didn’t do the work he paid for.”
Kootie hopped down from the counter. “You know his number?”
“Yes.”
“But you’ll need a lure,” he said, “remember? A ‘homing beacon.’”
She leaned sideways to pull her wallet out of her hip pocket, and then she dug a tattered, folded note out of it. “This is in his handwriting,” she said. “His emotional handwriting.” She looked over at Johanna by the stove. “Could you light the candles and…smear the oil over the door lintel, or whatever’s required?”
“Better than you, maybe,” said Johanna with a merry smile.
Elizalde looked at Sullivan. “Drop the dime.”
He was grateful to her for going first. “Okay. Kootie, turn up that fire.”
Sullivan stepped past Bradshaw into the dark office, and while Johanna struck matches to the candles on the shelves and shook out the oil and muttered rhymes under her breath, he dug out of his pocket the magnet they had pulled from the old telephone. He crouched beside the upright Langmuir gauge and waved the magnet past the tiny iron armature, and heard the faint contained ting as it rocked against the dangling quartz filament. Then he opened the outside door, sprinted out through the glaring sunlight to the covered van and set the magnet down on the asphalt beside it.