“I hope you don’t trust everybody,” he said.
Out of the top of her right sneaker she pulled a little leather cylinder with a white plastic nozzle at the top. It had a key ring at the base of it, and with the ring around her first finger she opened her hand to show it to him. “CN mace,” she said with a chillier smile. “In case the soup is bland. I don’t trust anybody…very far.”
Sullivan discarded the idea of taking offense. “Good.” He straightened his legs out across the floor and hooked a finger through the loop at the corner of the fanny pack that was hanging on his left hip; then, not knowing whether he was being honest with her or showing off, he pulled on the loop—the zippers whirred open as the front of the canvas pack pulled away, exposing the grip of the .45 under the Velcro cross-straps.
Her face was blank, but she echoed, “Good.”
She had taken her shoes and socks off and pulled the jumpsuit free of her ankles and tossed it aside. She stretched her legs, wiggling her toes in the air.
“But,” Sullivan went on. He unsnapped the belt and pulled it from around his waist, and then slid the fanny pack across the floor toward the door. “I’ve decided to trust you”
She stared at him expressionlessly for a long moment, but then she spun the leather-sleeved cylinder away. It bumped the heavy pack six feet away from where she sat, and she said softly, “All right. Are we partners, then? Do we shake on it?”
On his hands and knees he crossed the floor to her. They shook hands, and he crawled back to his wall and sat down again.
“Partners,” he said.
“What do you know about ghosts?”
To business, he thought. “People eat them,” he began at random. “They can be drawn out of walls or beds or empty air, made detectable, by playing period music and setting out props like movie posters; when they’re excited that way, magnetic compasses will point to ’em, and the air around tends to get cold because they’ve assumed the energy out of it. They like candy and liquor, though they can’t digest either one, and if they get waked up and start wandering around loose they mainly eat things like broken glass and dry twigs and rocks. They—”
“Produce from the Mojave ranches.”
“Amber fields of stone,” he agreed. “They’re frail little wasps of smoke when they’re new, or if they’ve been secluded and undisturbed. Unaroused, unexcited. The way you eat them is to inhale them. But if they wander around they begin to accrete actual stuff, physical mass, dirt and leaves and dog shit and what have you—”
“What have you,” she said, politely but with a shudder, “I insist”
“—and they grow into solid, human-looking things. They find old clothes, and they can talk well enough to panhandle change for liquor. They don’t have new thoughts, and tend to go on and on about old grievances. A lot of the street lunatics you see—maybe most of ’em—are this kind of hardened ghost. They’re no good to eat when they get like that. I worked for a woman who stayed young by finding and eating ghosts that had been preserved in the frail state, in old libraries and hotels and restaurants. She lives on water, aboard the Queen Mary—”
“I just heard about her! And she drowned her husband in the sea.”
Sullivan crawled across the floor again and picked up Elizalde’s beer. “I never heard of her having a husband. May I?”
Elizalde had one eyebrow cocked. “Help yourself, partner. I just wanted a sip to cut the dust.”
Sullivan took a deep swallow of the chilly beer. Then he sat down next to her, setting the can down on the floor between them.
“What do you know about séances?” he asked breathlessly. “Summoning specific ghosts?”
She picked up the can and finished the beer before answering him. “I know a turkey can hurt you if he hits you with a wing—you’ve got to have ‘em bagged up tight in a guinea sack. Excuse me. With ghosts, you’d be smart to have some restraints in place, before you call them. They do come when you call, sometimes. Séances are dangerous—sometimes one of them is for real.” She yawned, with another shudder at the end of it, and then she glanced at the two white hands braced against the door. Sullivan was thinking of the ghosts they’d seen in the parking lot a few minutes ago, and he guessed that she was too. “I’m not hungry,” she said in a low voice.
He knew what she was thinking: Let’s not open the door. “Me either,” he said.
“You’ve got your leather jacket for a pillow, and I can ball up my jumpsuit. Let’s go to sleep, and discuss this stuff when the sun’s up, hmm? We can even…leave the light on.”
“Okay.” He stood up and took off the jacket, but then crouched and folded it on the floor just a couple of feet from her, and stretched himself out parallel to the wall.
She had leaned toward the window to pick up the jumpsuit, and then she stared at him for several seconds. The gun and the mace spray were islands out in the middle of the floor.
At last she sighed and stretched out beside him, frowning uncertainly as she set the empty beer can on the floor between them. “You…read the whole interview?” she said as she slowly lowered her head to the bunched-up jumpsuit. She was looking away from him, facing the wall. “The interview of me, in L.A. Weekly!”
Sullivan remembered reading, I’ve reacted against the whole establishment I was raised in, there—I’m not Catholic, I don’t drink, and I don’t seem to be attracted much to men.
And he remembered Judy Nording, and Sukie, and his sonnet that had wound up so publicly in the trash. I suppose I’ve reacted too, he thought. “Yes,” he said gently.
As he closed his eyes and drifted toward sleep, he thought: Still, Doctor, you did try a couple of sips of beer.
BOOK THREE: HIDE, HIDE, THE COW’S OUTSIDE!
I don’t claim that our personalities pass on to another existence or sphere. I don’t claim anything because I don’t know anything about the subject; for that matter, no human being knows. But I do claim that it is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, this apparatus will at least give them better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and raps and ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication.
—Thomas Alva Edison,
Scientific American,
October 30, 1920
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
“But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, “to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
KOOTIE woke up when a black man nudged his foot with a bristly push broom. The boy straightened up stiffly in the orange plastic chair and blinked around at the silent chrome banks of clothes dryers, and he realized that he and the black man were the only people in the laundromat now. Whenever he had blinked out of his fitful naps during the long night, there had been at least a couple of women with sleepy children wearily clanking the change machine and loading bright-colored clothing into the washing machines in the fluorescent white glare, but they had all gone home. The parking lot out beyond the window wall was gray with morning-light now, and apparently today’s customers had not yet marshaled their laundry.