Elizalde pushed back the chair and stood up. “I fucking don’t—” she began in a choking voice—
And the musical buzz started up from the speaker by the sink; it stopped, and then started again.
She bent to snatch up the receiver again. “Hello?”
From the chalk-and-pencil-sharpener speaker behind her a cultured man’s voice said, “Could I speak to Don Jay, please?”
“That’s for me,” said Kootie, stepping forward and sitting down in the chair. Elizalde mutely handed him the receiver. He cleared his throat. “This is Thomas Edison,” he said.
The voice on the speaker exhaled sharply. “For God’s sake, this is an open line! Use elementary caution, will you? My son—”
“—Is safe,” said Kootie. His face was composed, but tears had begun to run down his cheeks. “We’ve got the line masked and deviled on this end.”
“God, and you’re speaking physically! With his voice! What—in hell—did we do?” Louder now, the voice called, “Kootie! Can you hear me, boy?”
Kootie’s reddening face relaxed into a grimace and he burst into tears. “I’m here, Dad, but don’t yell or—or the speaker might break, we’ve got it hooked up to a pencil sharpener. Mr. Edison is taking good care of me, don’t worry. But Dad! Tell Mom I didn’t mean to do it! I’m the one that should be dead! I tried to tell you before, but you were b-both d-d-drunk!” His head was down and his stiff poise was gone, and he was just sobbing.
Elizalde got on her knees beside him and put her arm around his bare narrow shoulders and rocked him gently.
“Boy, boy,” said the voice on the speaker shakily, “we’re fragmented here, we blur and break, and some of the pieces you talk to may be minimal. Your mother has gone on ahead, and perhaps has…found the white light, who knows? She told me to make you understand that she loves you, and I love you, and you were…”—the voice was still loud, but blurring—“mot to vlame for what haphened. Ee-bay areful-kay. Isten-lay oo-tay Om-Tay…”
Gradually the hissing background had been becoming textured with clinking and mumbling, and Sullivan thought he heard a voice in the middle distance say, Te explico, Federico?
“I love you!—Dad?” said Kootie loudly into the receiver; then he fumbled at the telephone until he had found and pushed the disconnect button. The speaker clicked and resonated hollowly, and faintly a woman’s voice said, “If you would like to make a call, please hang up, and dial again.”
Elizalde helped Kootie out of the chair, and to Sullivan she seemed to be hurrying the weeping boy, clearing the way so that he could finally call his father. She’s a psychiatrist, Sullivan thought. She probably figures this is all good therapy, all this awful idiot pathos.
As he sat down on the warmed chair seat he noticed that Edison was letting Kootie cry, not taking over the boy’s body again. Sullivan frowned—he knew the fused quartz filament would hold its initial vibration for quite a while in the rarefied mercury-vapor atmosphere inside the gauge, but it had to be picking up noise, random interference, to judge by the way the crowd effect kept creeping in.
But there was nothing Edison would have been able to do about it. At least the speaker was giving out only an even hiss right now.
Sullivan held out his open palm like a surgeon in the middle of an operation. “Thumb?”
Over Kootie’s shaking shoulder, Elizalde gave him a glance of exhausted pique. “Thumb,” she said, slapping Houdini’s black thumb into his hand.
Sullivan began dialing. Hide, hide, he thought, the cow’s outside? Or, Dad, I’m sorry I wasn’t out there treading water beside you, even if it would just have been to drown with you. Or simply, Dad, where have you been? What on earth am I supposed to do now?
He dialed the last numbers of SULLIVAN and laid the thumb down.
The speaker beside the sink buzzed as the woman’s voice came back on the line. “What number were you trying to reach?”
Her tone was palpably sarcastic now—and with a sudden emptiness in his chest he realized that, for the second time in four days, he was talking on the telephone to his twin sister, Sukie.
Impulsively he replied in a falsetto imitation of Judy Garland: “Oh, Auntie Em, I’m frightened!”
And Sukie came back quickly enough to override his last couple of syllables with “Auntie Em! Auntie Em!” in the sneering tones of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Sullivan sneaked a glance to the side. Everyone in the smoky kitchen, including fat Johanna in the office doorway, was staring at him; even Kootie had stopped crying in order to gape.
“He put her in a Leyden jar,” Sukie went on in a singsong voice, “and there he kept her near yet jar.”
What? thought Sullivan bewideredly. Put who in a Leyden jar? Auntie Em, in that crystal ball in the movie? A Leyden jar was an early kind of capacitor for storing a static electric charge. “What the hell, Sukie?” he said.
“This root beer will not pass away, Pete. Have you drained it yet?”
“—Yes.” The blood was thudding in his ears, and he felt as though he were standing behind his own body, leaning over its defeat-slumped shoulder. “At least you swam out.”
“We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. You should have drank more.
“‘We are but older children, dear,
Who fret to find our bedtime near.’”
“That’s from Alice,” said Sullivan.
“Through the Looking-Glass, actually” Sukie said. “Why do—you all—quote those books so much?”
“They’re not nonsense here, Pete. The little girl who falls down the deep well that’s lined with bookshelves and pictures—call it ‘your whole life flashing before your eyes’—the collapse of all the events of your timeline, down to an idiot unlocated point that occupies no space—the Alice books are an automortography. And then you’re in a place ‘where your…‘physical size’ is a wildly irrational variable, and distance and speed are problematical. And you can’t help but go among mad people.”
The volume was perceptibly diminishing; the vibrations of the quartz filament in the Langmuir gauge in the other room were becoming increasingly randomized. “I—” said Sullivan, “wanted to talk to Dad, actually….”
“He doesn’t want to talk to you, actually. You’re just going to have to be a little soldier about this. Lewis Carroll wasn’t dead, but he knew a little girl who did die—he had taken photographs of her, and he caught her ghost in a Leyden jar, just like Ben Franklin used to do. She told Lewis Carroll all those stories, and he wrote ‘em down” She paused then, and when she spoke again her voice was gentler. “You’re probably looking Commander Hold-’Em in the eye right now, aren’t you?”
Sullivan was. (He felt even further removed from his seated body than he had a few minutes ago, and he knew that, if Elizalde refused to give him back the .45, he could easily find something else—hell, he could walk in two minutes from here to the ocean, and just swim out.) His father had not forgotten nor forgiven. Over the reeks of burnt mint and Bradshaw’s cinnamon-and-rot breath and his own beery sour sweat, Sullivan could smell Copper tone lotion and mayonnaise and the terrible sea. “If you care,” he whispered.