Once, in Paris in 1901. Oaks had psychically traced Houdini to a sidewalk cafe—but when Oaks walked up to the place with a gun in his pocket, seven bald men at the tables in front simultaneously took off their hats and bowed their heads, revealing the seven letters H-O-U-D-l-N-I painted one apiece on their shining scalps, and that grotesque assembly were as the only “Houdini” that was present.
Always in his stage act Houdini was untraceably switching places with his wife (whom he had taken care to marry in three different ceremonies); another favorite trick was escaping out of a big milk can that was filled with water and padlocked shut—so that each escape was confusingly like a reexperienced birth. (Slippery!) In Boston in the fall of 1911, Oaks had been closing in on Houdini—the magician was weakened with a fever and haunted by dreams of his dead older brother—when suddenly the magician’s psychic ground-signal was extinguished; Oaks had panicked, and expended far too much energy trying to find the ghost; and then, recuperating in defeat afterward, learned that the magician had had himself chained inside the belly of a dead sea monster during the eclipsed period. (The creature had been washed up dead on a Cape Cod beach, and was described as “a cross between a whale and an octopus.”)
In the 1920s Oaks had got closer. Houdini had begun a new career as an exposer of phony spiritualist mediums who weren’t entirely phony, and ghosts themselves had begun to threaten him. The famous Boston medium Margery gave a séance near Christmas of ‘24, and the ghost of her dead brother Walter announced that Houdini had less than a year to live. Houdini lived out the year, but on Halloween of 25, he was stricken with a “severe cold,” and after a brief, restless sleep stayed up all night. Oaks had managed to get into Houdini’s hotel room, but the sick magician had climbed out the window and disappeared until showing up protected at the Syracuse train station the next day.
On the following Halloween, in 1926, Oaks had managed to end the chase. Houdini’s wife Bess got ptomaine poisoning from rat excrement that Oaks had managed to put into her dinner, and the magician had to travel without her masking presence. On October 11, in Albany, a ghost had been coached to walk translucently out onto the stage where a manacled Houdini was being hoisted into the air by his bound ankles and lowered into his Water Cell, a glass-sided tank from which he was supposed to escape; the ghost got itself caught in the pulleys, and Houdini was jokingly dropped a foot before the rope retightened, and a bone in his left ankle was broken. Houdini didn’t try to complete that trick, but bravely went on with the rest of his act. Then, on October 22 at the Princess Theatre in Montreal, a blurry-minded religious student was induced to visit the magician in his dressing room and try Houdini’s claim to be able to withstand the hardest punches; the student struck without giving Houdini any warning so that he could brace himself, and the four solid blows ruptured the magician’s appendix.
Houdini of course didn’t stop performing. He finished the run in Montreal the next day, and on the twenty-fourth he opened at the Garrick Theater in Detroit. But Oaks had known that the man was dying now. That night Houdini was admitted to Grace Hospital, diagnosed with streptococcal peritonitis.
And so Oaks had got what might have been the first of his janitorial jobs at a hospital. It took Houdini a week longer to die, and in that time Oaks managed to snag a few fresh ghosts—but when Houdini finally did die, at 1:26 p.m., he died masked. Oaks was ready to catch him, and strained numbingly hard after Houdini’s ghost when the magician died, but the old magician had been as slick as ever, and his ghost had darted away from Oaks’s grasp in a flicker of false memories and counterfeit dates and assumed identities.
Oaks had seized and devoured a splash of fresh ghosts—but they had nothing to do with Houdini. Later he learned that a baby girl had been born in the same instant as Houdini’s death, and he realized that what he had caught was the natal explosion of stress-thrown ghost-shells emitted by the newborn infant.
It had been tasty, but it had not been Houdini.
Spiritually depleted by the decades of that useless pursuit, Oaks had gone hungrily after the other psychically conspicuous figure of the time—Thomas Alva Edison. And he had had no luck there either.
SHERMAN OAKS boosted himself down off the cinder-block wall and shambled across the parking lot.
At some weary point last night he had got on a bus. He had dozed off, and when he’d snapped awake he had been sitting in a moving streetcar, one of the old long-gone Red Car Line, and he had passively ridden it south to the Long Beach Pike on the shore of Long Beach Harbor. He had got out of the streetcar and dazedly walked up and down the arc-lit midway, among the tattoo parlors and the baseball-pitch booths, startled repeatedly by the ratcheting clank of the Ferris-wheel chain and the snap-clang of .22 rounds being fired at steel ducks in the shooting gallery. The only lighted construct against the blackness of ocean had been the Cyclone Racer roller coaster—the Queen Mary had still been somewhere on the other side of the world, steaming across the sunlit face of the Atlantic.
On the street in front of him this morning he was seeing Marlboro billboards with slogans in Spanish, and Nissans and the boxy new black-and-white RTD diesel buses; the Mexican teenagers at the corner were wearing untucked black T-shirts and baggy pants with the crotches at their knees, and from the open window of a passing Chevy Blazer boomed some Pearl Jam song. He was living in 1992 again—the bus trip last night had been a brief tour through long-lost snapshots, requickened memories.
Yesterday, in the minivan in the back of the truck, he had animated one of the memories that had been tumbling back into him since Monday night—a moving-picture snapshot of the old Angel’s Flight cable car that used to climb the hill from Third Street to Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles, until it was torn down for redevelopment schemes in the sixties. He had projected the hallucination to help awaken the clathrated ghost inside the boy, excite the ghost like an atom in a laser tube, so that Oaks would be sure of sucking the big old ghost out, along with the boy’s trivial ghost, when he would finally succeed in killing the boy. And then Edison’s ghost had countered by animating a relevant and defensive snapshot-memory of its own.
As much as it had been a shock to Oaks to realize that it was a memory they happened to have in common, it must also have been a shock to the ghost of Thomas Edison.
OAKS HAD gone after the world-famous inventor in late 1926—but the memory that the Edison ghost had projected had shown Oaks trying to get that ghost at a far earlier time, when Edison had been an anonymous but obviously strong-spirited boy selling snacks and papers on a train somewhere near Detroit.
Oaks thought about that now. In that surprisingly shared memory the boy Edison had been…twelve? Fifteen? God, that would have to have been in the early 1860s, during the Civil War! Oaks had been an adult…a hundred and thirty years ago!
How old am I? wondered Oaks bewilderedly. How long have I been at this?
Well, I was no more successful with damnable Edison in 1929 than I was on that train during the Civil War.
Or in the truck yesterday.
AS SOON as he had recovered from the loss of Houdini’s ghost, Oaks had made his way to Edison’s home in East Orange, New Jersey; and then down the coast to the “Seminole Lodge” on the Caloosahatchee River in Fort Myers, Florida, where Edison and his wife spent the winters.