Kootie didn’t want to do any more work. Why was it always his muscles and joints that took the wear and tear? “What’s a six signal? I bet we don’t need it.”
“Tramp telegraphers have to tap out a signal every hour, all night long. Called a ‘six signal.’ It’s to show that you’re still awake, alert, ready to participate. I used to just hook up a clock to a rotary saw blade, so it sent the signals for me, right on time, while I napped. Up, lad, it won’t take but a few moments.”
Kootie struggled to his feet one more time, and then he took out the chalk and, crouching, drew a big oval all the way around the car, which, he now saw, was a wrecked old Dodge Dart, of God knew what color under the dust of years. This time he drew arrows radiating out from the circumference, and he spit several times outside the wobbly chalk line.
“That’ll make it seem that we’re up and about, in a number of places,” said Edison, “and for the night I can clathrate myself inside your head again—voluntarily this time!—with all hatches battened down. Then we’ll be as damn hard to find as a gray hat in a rock pile.” It seemed to Kootie that this simile had been derived from experience. “And we should sleep, and we should sleep.”
Edison used Kootie’s fingers to probe the car-door lock with a bit of wire he found on the pavement; but after a while he swore and tossed it away and just had Kootie punch in the wind-wing window with a chunk of concrete. Kootie’s arm was just barely long enough for his stretched-out fingers to reach the lock-post button.
Kootie stepped back and opened the door—wincing at the echoing screech of the ancient hinges—and then he leaned inside, breathing shallowly in musty air that somehow nevertheless had a flavor of new houses.
The seats and floor of the car proved to be stacked with dozens of ancient gallon paint cans that someone had once halfheartedly covered with a stiffened drop cloth, and Kootie had to lift some of the cans out and set them down on the pavement just to have room to sit with his legs stretched out. He didn’t know if the old man could feel the aching, stinging fatigue in his shoulders and knees—and in his hip, which pain he now remembered that the old man was responsible for—but Edison didn’t argue when Kootie suggested that this was enough, and that they could sleep sitting up.
Kootie pulled the door closed—slowly, so that it wouldn’t squeal again. The broken wind-wing wasn’t letting in much fresh air, so he wrestled with the door’s crank handle and managed to open the passenger-side window several inches, enough to probably keep the fumes of mummified paint from overcoming him during the night. That done, he bent the old drop cloth snugly around his shoulders and shifted around until he found a position in which he could relax without setting off any big twinges of pain.
The empty lot was unlit, and it was very dark inside the old car.
Sometimes his father had come into Kootie’s room at bedtime and had haltingly and awkwardly tried to talk to the boy. Once, after Kootie had supposedly gone to sleep, he had heard his father, back out in the kitchen with his mother, dejectedly refer to the conversations as “quality time.” Still, it had been comforting, in its way.
“So you fixed up this phone,” he ventured now, speaking quietly in the close shelter.
“Hm? Oh, yes, that I did. Do you remember the story of Rumpelstiltskin? Your parents must have told it to you.”
No. Kootie’s parents had told him all about Rama and Koot Hoomie and Zorro-Aster and Jiddu Krishnamurti (in whose holy-man footsteps he had been intended to follow), and about self-realization and meditation, and the doings of various Egyptian holy men. But at least he had heard about Rumpelstiltskin in school. Thank God for school. “Sure,” he said now, sleepily.
“Well, you remember that the little man didn’t want anybody to know what his name was. That’s important if a person is like you and me—misfortunate enough to be tethered by a stout leash of responsibility to somebody who’s in the ghost world; it’s like we’ve got one loot outside of time, isn’t it, so that we react to noises and jolts just a split instant before they actually happen.”
“You’ve had that happen too,” said Kootie faintly, slumping farther down in the warming seat.
“Ever since I watched a playmate drown in a creek when I was five, son. So have a lot of unhappy people. And that.. antenna we carry around makes us stand out to ghosts. They’re drawn to us, and without meaning any harm they can attach themselves to us and sympathetically induce the collapse of our time lines—kill us, like a parasite that kills its host.
“People like you and me, if we manage to live long, have generally had a wanderjahr, a time of wandering around untraceably, often luckily giving a fake name and fake birth date, while we get the time to figure out what the hell’s going on. I was a plug telegrapher when I was sixteen, that’s like an apprentice, and for years I rode trains all over this country, because there was always ready work for any class of telegrapher during the Civil War. Blavatsky was doing her wander-time around then too: Europe, Mexico, Tibet. What you learn, if you’re lucky, is that you need a mask if you’re going to deal up close with ghosts. You can’t let them get a handle on you, not anything. Real name and real birth date, especially. Those are solid handles.”
Edison blew a chuckle out of Kootie’s mouth. “One time in the early seventies I had to go to City Hall in Newark to pay real-estate taxes—last day, big fine if I didn’t—and the fellow behind the desk was one of the big solidified ghosts, who had managed the no doubt difficult task of scraping together enough alertness to hold a county job, and he asked me what my name was. Hah! I had to pretend I couldn’t remember! And pay the fine! My own name! Everybody in line thought I was an imbecile.”
Kootie yawned so widely that tears ran down his cheeks, and it interrupted Edison’s monologue. “So who did you call that was still alive?” he asked. “That must be embarrassing—‘Hi, George, what are you doing there? Did you just this morning die or something?”‘
Breath whickered out of his nostrils as Edison laughed softly. “That’s just about exactly how it went. In 1921 I had got the spirit phone working: it required summoning back the ghost of my dead playmate—by then I had managed to cauterize the bit of him that had been stuck to me, sort of the way I’m stuck to you right now—and energizing him in a strong electromagnetic field. He was still my antenna. And then his augmented charge was amplified dramatically with an induction coil, and then, he was…the operator.
“I was trying to call a man named William Sawyer, who had died forty years earlier; Sawyer was an electrical inventor who claimed to have come up with the electric lamp before I did, and wanted me to buy him out. I told him to go to hell, I just left him in the dust, and then he came around to my place when I was giving an exhibition, right after Christmas in, it must have been, ‘79. Sawyer came drunk, yelling and shouting that it was all fake, and he broke a vacuum pump and stole eight of the electric lamps, which I didn’t have a lot of in those days. In the years after that, I had some opportunities to help him—and I didn’t do it. I hadn’t forgotten the theft and the vandalism, you see, and whenever I was asked about him I made sure to drip—I mean, made sure to drop—some unflattering statements about him. He turned into a drunk, and wound up killing a man, and he died before he could go to prison. So, forty years later, I was trying to get him on the phone to…” Kootie’s hands lifted.