At the foot of the bridge he stopped, and let his breathing slow down. This bridge was part of a street, Dell Street, and he could hear cars sighing past on South Venice Boulevard ahead. Even if something audibly swirled the water of the canal now, he felt that he could sprint and be in the middle of the boulevard before his first squirted tears of fright would have had time to hit the pavement.
With a careful, measured tread he walked up the slope of the bridge, and he paused at the crest. Ahead of him on the right side of the street was the grandest yet of the neo-Tudor buildings, a place with gables and stained-glass windows and an inset tower with antique chimney pots on its shingled funnel roof. He was wondering if it might be a restaurant, with a bar and a men’s room, when in the bright stillness he heard something splashing furtively in the water under the bridge.
All he did was exhale all the air out of his lungs, and then rest his hands on the coping of the bridge and look down over the edge.
THERE WAS someone crouched down there, beside a small white fiberglass rowboat that had been drawn up onto the gravel slope beside the bridge abutment; the figure was wearing a tan jumpsuit and a many-colored knitted tarn that concealed the hair, but Sullivan could see by the flexed curve of the hips and the long legs that it was a woman. Blinking and peering more closely, he saw that the woman wasn’t looking at the boat, but at the barred storm drain that the boat was moored to. She was swirling her hand in the water and calling softly through the grating, as if to someone in the tunnel on the other side of the steel bars.
“Frank?” she said. “Frank, don’t hide from me.”
Sullivan’s heart was pounding again, and belatedly he wondered if he had really wanted to find this Elizalde woman.
For that had to be who this was. Still, he silently reached up to his coat pocket (the pocket flap felt rough, like cloth instead of leather) and fished out a lightbulb. Holding it by the threaded metal base, he swung the glass bulb at the stone coping of the bridge.
“Yah!” shouted the woman below, scrambling up and splashing one foot into the water; and the bulb popped against the coping.
She turned a scared glance up at him, and a moment later she had ducked under the bridge, out of his sight.
“Wait!” yelled Sullivan, hurrying down the landward slope of the bridge. “Doctor—” No, he thought, don’t yell her last name out here, that won’t reassure her. “Angelica!”
She had splashed under the bridge and was back up in the sunlight on the bank on the west side, striding away from him, obviously ready to break into a run at any sound of pursuit. A couple of ducks on the bank hurried into the water, out of her way.
“We can help each other!” he called after her, not stepping down from the bridge onto the sidewalk. “Please, you’re trying to get in touch with this Frank guy, and I need to get in touch with my father!” She was still hurrying away, her long legs taking her farther away with every stride. She wouldn’t even look back. “Lady,” Sullivan yelled in despair, “I need your help!”
That at least stopped her, though she still didn’t turn around.
He opened his mouth to say something else, but she spoke first, in a low, hoarse voice that carried perfectly to his ears but would probably have been inaudible ten feet back: “Go away. My help is poison.”
Here I am in Venice Beach, he thought. “Well, so’s mine. Maybe we cancel out.”
When she turned around she was pushing the knitted cap back from her face, and then she rubbed her hand down her forehead and jaw as if she had a headache or was very tired. “You know who I am,” she said. “Don’t say your name here, and don’t say mine again.” She waved him to silence when he opened his mouth, then went on, “You can follow me to the big parking lot, if you like. Don’t get close to me.”
She walked back, past the foot of the bridge, and started up Dell Street, walking next to the slack-rope fence of the white Tudor house Sullivan had thought was a restaurant. When she had passed it and was halfway to the stop sign at South Venice, he started forward from the bottom of the bridge.
After a few steps, he stopped in confusion and looked down at his own legs.
He was wearing…someone else’s pants, somehow. Instead of the blue jeans he had pulled on in the gym at City College this morning, he was wearing formal gray wool trousers. With cuffs. He crouched to touch them, and two more snaps popped loose from the sleeve of his coat, and then the sleeve was disattached, hanging down over his hand. The sleeve was wool too—he slapped dizzily at his sides—the whole garment was, and it was a suit coat. He couldn’t help looking back, to see if his leather jacket might somehow be lying on the bridge behind him. It wasn’t.
He pulled the sleeve off with his other hand. The upper edge was hemmed, with metal snaps sewed on. He gripped the cuff of the other sleeve and tugged, and that sleeve came off too, with a popping of snaps. (He noted that he was now wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, no longer the plaid flannel he remembered.) The coat was convertible, it could be worn with the sleeves long or short.
Why, he wondered, would anyone want a short-sleeved formal coat?
Well, it occurred to him, a magician might. To show that he didn’t have anything up his sleeves. Houdini was a magician, wasn’t he? Maybe I didn’t lose the mask after all—maybe I’m wearing it.
He breathed deeply, and watched the ducks paddling out across the water. He was still nervous, but the sense of imposed isolation, of being the only moving thing on a microscope slide, had moved on past him.
He looked at his hands, and in the middle of this dream-logic afternoon he wasn’t very surprised, or even very scared, to see (though the sight did speed up his heartbeat) that his hands were different. The fingers were thicker, the nails trimmed rather than bitten, and the thumbs were longer. There were a few small scars on the knuckles, but the scars he remembered were gone.
He lifted the hands and ran the fingers through his hair, and immediately his arms tingled with goose bumps: for his hair felt kinky and wiry, not straight and fine as it normally did. But it was falling back into limp strands as he disordered it, and he could now feel again the constriction of creased leather around his elbows.
When he lowered his arms he found himself catching the sudden weight of the plaster hands; he gripped them firmly and slung them safely under his left arm. A lightbulb broke with a muffled pop in the pocket of his leather jacket, but he didn’t need the lightbulbs anymore.
“Um!” he said loudly, to catch Elizalde’s attention. “Hey, lady!”
She stopped and looked back, and his first thought was that she was a much shorter person than he had originally thought. Then he realized that this was a different woman—plumper than Elizalde, and with curly dark hair unconfined by any sort of hat, and wearing a long skirt.
But it had to be Elizalde. “Look at yourself,” he said quickly, for the skirt was already becoming transparent.
The woman looked down at her own legs, which were now again zipped into the tan jumpsuit. And though Sullivan had not blinked nor seen her figure shift at all against the background of pavement and distant buildings, she was taller, as if she had suddenly moved closer.
He hurried up the narrow sunlit street toward her, and she let him get within ten feet of her before she stepped back.
“You saw that?” he asked.
Elizalde’s olive complexion had gone very pale at some point in the last minute. She looked at the lumpy bandanna Sullivan was carrying. “You’re not another damned ghost, are you?” she asked.