What, thought Oaks uneasily. You just wanted somebody to chat with? Or did you do it simply to fox my radar this way?
Sherman Oaks felt tense, nearly brittle, and he kept calling to mind the collapsed, hijacked-flesh face he had seen on the steps to the parking level at the Music Center this afternoon. Who the hell was that, who is this big ghost?
The threads of association trailed away back into the blankness that was his life before the awakening of consciousness in the district of Sherman Oaks three years ago.
But he shook his head sharply. Enough idle chatter, he told himself, quit dishing the applesauce. If the compass is temporarily foxed, that only means that you’re back on a limited-to-visual footing. Get your footing moving—you know you’re on the right track, and you know he’s close.
“SO WHAT was the telephone you invented?” Kootie asked tiredly. He had walked down the side street, away from the streaking headlights of Wilshire, and was now staring through a chain-link fence at an enclosed paved yard that was shadowed from the intermittent moonlight by surrounding buildings.
“Well, I had to stop work on it. I found I was able to call people who hadn’t died yet. What do you suppose this is?”
“Hadn’t died?” Suddenly Kootie was uncomfortable with this conversation. “It’s an empty lot.”
“With, for once, no barbed wire on the fence. And it’s got a couple of old cars in there, that look like they’ve been there since Ford first rolled them off the production line. Damn Ford anyway.”
Kootie remembered having said Damn Ford when Raffle had seen the reward-for-this-boy billboard at the Music Center; and he realized that it must have been Edison talking then, and that he had been referring to Henry Ford, rather than to Raffle’s car.
Kootie found that he had curled his fingers through the chain link, and was looking up and down the empty sidewalk.
“What did Ford do to you?” he asked.
He wasn’t really surprised when he began helplessly climbing the fence, but he had certainly not expected the old man to be so agile. “Ow!” Kootie exclaimed breathlessly at one point, “watch the right ankle!—Oh, sorry.” The street was silent except for the rush of cars back on Wilshire and the immediate thrashing clang of the shaken chain-link.
Astride the crossbar at the top, Kootie’s body paused to catch its breath. “When I was dying,” said Edison, “Ford made my son catch my last breath in a test tube for him.” In deference to Kootie’s ankle, he didn’t just jump, but climbed down the other side.
At last unhooking his fingers from the chain-link, Kootie hurried across the cracked pavement of the enclosed lot to the nearest of the abandoned cars. Shaggy night-blooming jasmine bushes overhung the car, and crumpled plastic bags had been shrink-wrapped by Monday’s wind right onto the heavy leafy clusters, like butterflies captured in midnight poses against the fronts of car radiators.
When Kootie was crouched behind the fender, Edison went on in a whisper, “Oh, he meant well—just like he did when he built an exact replica of my Menlo Park lab, for his ‘Light’s Golden Jubilee’ in 1929, the fiftieth anniversary of my incandescent lamp. That must have confused a whole nation of ghosts and ghost trackers—Ford reconstructed the entire lab, even using actual planks from my old buildings, with the old dynamos and half-built stockticker machines on the benches inside, and all the old tools. And he even erected a duplicate of the boardinghouse across the street! And he trucked in genuine red New Jersey clay, for the soil around the buildings! And there was a villain hanging around me in those days, trying to hook out my soul—I fed the fellow a poisoned apple!—and it was against such people that Ford was trying to protect me. Oh, it’s hard to fault the.. the generous, sentimental old fool, even now, now that I’m hiding in an empty lot in Los Angeles in…what year is it?”
“1992,” said Kootie.
“Good…God. I died sixty-one years ago.” Kootie had stopped panting after the exertion of climbing the fence, but now he was breathing hard again. “And I rattled my last breath into a test tube, which my son Charles then stopped up and obediently gave to Henry Ford.” Kootie found himself staring at his hands and shaking his head. “Where did you get it?”
Into the ensuing silence, Kootie said, flatly, “My parents had it. Hidden inside a bust of Dante. They’ve had it forever. Had it.”
“Inside Dante, eh? Just like I’m inside your head now. I guess I’m your built-in Virgil, though I’ve got to admit I don’t really know the neighborhood. I wonder when we get to El Paradisio? Huh. Sounds like a Mexican speakeasy.”
“So Ford was trying to protect you.”
“In his blundering way. Yeah, from ghosts and ghost hunters both—I stood out like a spiritualist bonfire. And—” Kootie’s shoulders shrugged. “It was to honor, me, too. A replica of the great man’s lab, the great man’s actual last breath! He was pleased to see his friends get accolades. He’d have been tickled to death—as it were—to know that I finally got a B.S.” Kootie could feel his pulse thumping faster in his chest. “And not an honorary one, either—it was earned! The faculty examined seventeen portfolios of my research! And this was at Thomas A. Edison State College—if you please!—in Trenton, New Jersey.”
“I…dreamed about that,” said Kootie softly, “Sunday night.” It, the thought of college, was the spur that finally made me put my run-away plan into action, he thought. Which has turned out to have put a lot of other stuff into action, too. “I must have been picking it up from you, you all worked up in the bust in the living room.”
The laugh that came out of his mouth then was embarrassed. “I guess I was excited about it myself. A little. Not that I put any stock in academic honors.” He shrugged again. “The news was all over the party line.”
“Yeah,” said Kootie, “I met some old lady that wanted to talk to you. Probably had a graduation present for you.” Kootie sighed, feeling bad about dead people. “What are you gonna do with the ghost in the film can?”
Kootie could feel that Edison’s mood was down too, and had been for the last several minutes; probably Kootie’s own melancholy was largely induced in his surrounding mind by the suggestion from Edison’s frail, contained ghost.
“The ghost in the film can,” said Edison. “If he hasn’t died in there yet, we could talk to him on my telephone. If we had my telephone with us I could work it. You might be able to as well—you strike me as another boy who’s carrying around some solid guilty link with a dead person or two, hm?”
“I…guess I am.” Kootie was too desolated and exhausted, here in the dark empty lot, to cry.
“There now, son, I don’t mean to stir it up.” Edison had Kootie sit down, leaning back against the car body. The wind was rustling softly in the fronds of a stocky wild palm on the far side of the car, and the only sound on the breeze was the rapid pop-pop-pop of semiautomatic gunfire, comfortably far away.
“My telephone,” Edison said. “I got the ghost-telephone idea when a spiritualist paid Marconi to buy my Lehigh Valley grasshopper telegraph patents for him. It was originally a scheme to make two-way telegraphy possible on a moving train, by an induction current between plates on the train and telegraph wires overhead, with regularly spaced dispatcher stations along the way, hence ‘grasshopper.’ But…they got a lot of random clicking, some bits of which turned out to be…oh, you know, idiot clowning: Shave and a haircut, two bits, and Hey Rube, and the beats of the Lohengrin wedding march and popular songs. Even so, I didn’t figure it out until the spiritualist bought the patents.” He yawned. “Up, son, I’ve got to set up the apparatus for our night’s worth of six signals.”