“…Apologize?”
After a few seconds of silence, Edison said, softly, “Yep.” He exhaled. “But you get a crowd on that line, it’s a party line, and everybody wants to talk. When they heard who was calling, somebody picked up, and I found myself talking to a mathematician who I had fired the day before! I was flabbergasted, and I said something like, ‘Lord, Tom, did you kill yourself today?’ All he wanted to do was recite poems to me, so I hung up and went round to his house. It developed that he had had a nervous breakdown, but had not in fact died. So I hired him back. But I had learned that people can sometimes throw ghosts in moments of high stress, and those ghosts can sometimes wander away just exactly the same as though the people had died. They are the same.”
“So…you quit work on the phone because of that?”
Suddenly agitated, Edison said, “Those aren’t the people, the people you harmed, those ghosts. It’s—like trying to make amends to somebody’s car, after they’ve parked it and walked away. Blavatsky was right when she claimed that the spirits called up by mediums are just animate shells. You can talk to the ghost of your dead uncle Bob, but Uncle Bob himself doesn’t know anything about it. Chesterton said that, I believe.” He shook Kootie’s head. “What you’ve got to do is somehow rehire the sons of bitches.”
Rehire my mom and dad? thought Kootie. “But…they’re dead. What do you do about that?”
For nearly a whole minute there was silence.
Then, quietly, “Don’t look at me, son, I’m one of ‘em myself. Go to sleep now.”
A fleeting impression of a candle being blown out and a door being closed, and then Kootie was alone in his own head again. Before loneliness could creep up on him he closed his eyes, and he was instantly asleep.
BEYOND THE dust-crusted glass of the car’s windows, out on the sidewalk past the end of the lot and the chain-link fence, a silhouette came shuffling along from the direction of Wilshire Boulevard. Only one arm swung as it ambled along, though the torso rocked as though another arm were swinging alongside too. The head was turning to look one way and another, with frequent pauses to glance down at the figure’s waist, but the silhouette registered no change in its pace as if walked on down the sidewalk, past the lot, and disappeared to the south.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
“…I wonder what’ll become of my name when I go in? I shouldn’t like to lose it at all—because they’d have to give me another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one. But then the fun would be, frying to find the creature that had got my old name! That’s just like the advertisements, you know, when people lose dogs—‘answers to the name of “Dash”: had on a brass collar’—just fancy calling everything you met ‘Alice,’ till one of them answered! Only they wouldn’t answer at all, if they were wise.”
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
BY eleven o’clock in the morning, Hollywood Boulevard was a crowded tourist street again, and it was the signs overhead—movie marquees, names of ethnic fast-food restaurants, huge red Coca-Cola logos, and the giant infantry soldier over the army-surplus store—that caught the eye. Bui when Sullivan had driven down the boulevard at dawn, it had been the pavements that he had watched; empty lanes still blocked by last night’s police barricades, litter in the gutters, and solitary junkies and long-night male and female prostitutes shambling wearily toward unimaginable refuges in the gray shadows.
Sullivan turned down Cherokee, parked his van in the lot on the south side of Miceli’s and switched off the engine, and for a few minutes he just sat in the van and smoked a cigarette and sipped at a freshly popped can of beer. Thank God for the propane refrigerator, he thought.
Just because he had parked here didn’t mean he had to eat at Miceli’s. He remembered a Love’s barbecue place on Hollywood Boulevard just a block or two away. He could even restart the van and go eat at Canter’s, or Lawry’s. What he should do, in fact, was get a to-go sandwich somewhere; he had no business blowing his finite money in sit-down restaurants.
It had been here at Miceli’s, on that rainy night in the fall of ‘86, that he had had his last dinner with Judy Nording; the dinner at which she had been so distant and cold, after which he had gone back to the apartment he’d shared with Sukie, and had got drunk and written his ill-fated sonnet.
You’re here to exorcise the ghost, he told himself comfortably as the cold beer uncoiled in his stomach. Prove to yourself that there’s no more power to sting in those old memories—
And then he winced and look a deep swallow of the beer, for he remembered his real ghosts: Sukie, who for years had been so close a companion that the two of them were almost one person, their love for each other so deeply implicit that it could be unspoken, ignored, and finally forgotten; and his father, whose wallet and key ring (and three Hires Root Beer cans) he and Sukie had intolerably left behind when they had mindlessly fled deLarava’s shoot in Venice Beach on Christmas Eve of 1986.
He had spent this morning at City College. He had showered and washed his hair in the cologne-reeking men’s gym, setting his clothes and “scapular” and fanny pack on a bench he could see from the broad tile floor where the showerheads were mounted against the wall, so that he wouldn’t have to rent an authorized padlock for the brief use of a locker, and possibly have to show some ID; and then he had got dressed again and reluctantly walked over to the library.
He’d made his way upstairs to the reference section, a maze of tall shelves full of ranked orange plastic file folders stuffed with newspapers and magazines, and endless sets of leather-bound volumes with titles like Current Digest of the Soviet Press and Regional Studies, and with some help he managed to find the long metal cabinets of drawers where the microfilm was kept.
He’d pried out the boxed spool of the Los Angeles Times from July to December of 1990 and carried it to a projector in one of the reading booths. Once the film was properly threaded and rolling, he sat for several minutes watching July newspaper pages trundle past on the glowing screen—advertisements, comics, and all—until he inadvertently discovered that there was a fast-forward setting on the control knob. At last he found the first of November. (President Bush had “had it” with Saddam Hussein; the governor’s race between Wilson and Feinstein was still too close to call.)
The Elizalde story was at the bottom corner of the front page: THREE DEAD IN CLINIC BLAZE. According to the text, a firebomb had been detonated in Dr. Angelica Anthem Elizalde’s psychiatric clinic on Beverly Boulevard at 8:40 P.M. on Halloween night. The resulting three-alarm fire brought fifty firefighters, from Los Angeles, Vernon, and Huntington Park, who put the fire out in forty-five minutes. Dr. Elizalde, 32, had suffered second-degree burns while trying to extinguish one of the patients who had caught fire; altogether, three of her patients had died, though only that one had died of burns; and five more were hospitalized with unspecified traumas. Police and the Fire Department were investigating the incident.