Edison had been eighty years old then. He had retired from the Edison Phonograph Company only weeks earlier, leaving it in the hands of his son Charles, and was planning to devote his remaining years to the development of a hybrid of domestic goldenrod weeds that would yield latex for rubber, to break the monopoly of the British Malayan rubber forests.
The old man might as well have been made of rubber, for all the dent Oaks had been able to put in him during the next couple of years.
Edison had invented motion pictures, and voice-recording, and telephones, largely for their value as psychic masks, and with a transformer and an induction coil and a lightning rod with some child’s toy hung on it he could have ghosts flashing past as rapidly as the steel ducks in the Pike shooting gallery, confounding any efforts to draw a bead on the real spirit of Edison behind all the decoys.
But Oaks had managed to sneak carbon tetrachloride into the old mans coffee in the summer of 1929, and as the kidneys began to tail and the doctors speculated about diabetes, the psychic defenses had weakened too; like the van der Waals force that lets an atom’s nucleus have a faint magnetic effect when its surrounding neutralizing electrons are grossly low in energy, the old man’s exhaustion was letting his real self gleam through the cloud of distracting spectral bit-players and simulations.
Oaks had begun to move in—but Edison’s friend Henry Ford had moved more quickly. As an exhibit in his Ford Museum, in Dearborn Michigan, he had built a precise duplicate of Edison’s old Menlo Park laboratory. It couldn’t even be dismissed as a replica, for he had used actual boards and old dynamos and even dirt from the original. And Edison visited the place, and was emotionally moved by it, thus grievously fragmenting his psychic locus.
Ford had arranged a gala “Golden Jubilee of Light” to be celebrated on the 21st of October at the Dearborn museum. Oaks had met Edison—along with Ford and President Hoover!—at a railway station near Detroit, and in Edison’s honor the whole party had transferred to a restored, Civil War-vintage wood-burning locomotive.
In the instant when Oaks was poised to kill Edison and inhale the man’s ghost—and then escape somehow—a period-costumed trainboy had walked down the aisle of the railway car, carrying a basket of traveler’s items for sale. Edison, sensing Oaks’s momentarily imminent attack, snatched the basket from the boy—and then the eighty-two-year-old inventor tottered a few steps down the aisle, weakly calling, “Candy, apples, sandwiches, newspapers!”
And so the image in Oaks’s psychic sights was fragmented in the instant of his striking; there were suddenly two Edisons in the car, or else perhaps two boys and no Edison at all. Oaks managed to keep from uselessly, blindly firing the gun in his pocket, but he was unable to restrain his long-prepared psychic inhalation.
Edison had been ready for him, too. He must have set up this replay of the remembered train scenario as a trap. The old man smashed a doctored apple against a wooden seat back and shoved the split fruit into Oaks’s face, and Oaks helplessly inhaled the confined, spoiled ghost that had been put into it.
OAKS HAD been… jammed up.
Not yet sure what had happened to him, knowing only that he had failed to get Edison, Oaks had stumbled off the antique train at Dearborn and disappeared into the crowd.
And he had discovered that he couldn’t eat ghosts anymore—and that he needed to. The Bony Express had begun to assail his identity inside his head, and he could feel himself fragmenting as their power increased and his own declined.
Desperately reasoning that what Edison had done, Edison could undo, he had tried to get an audience with the great man—after all, he hadn’t done anything obviously overt on the tram, and he had actually worked for a while at Edison’s Kinetoscope studio in the Bronx in the early nineteen-teens, to make pocket money and calculate countermasking techniques, while keeping up his pursuit of Houdini—but Ford and Charles Edison had kept him away, and kept Edison secluded and effectively masked.
And so Oaks had returned to Eos Angeles in despair, to commit suicide while he “still had a sui to cide,” as he had grimly told himself.
The method he chose was sentimental. He went to his stash box, a rented locker in a South Alameda warehouse in those days, and selected a choice smoke he’d been saving—and then he drew it into a hypodermic needle and injected the five cc’s of potent air into the big vein inside his left elbow.
He expected the air bubble to cause an embolism and stop his heart.
Instead, the ghost he had injected, perceiving itself to be in a host that was about to fragment into death, spontaneously combusted in idiot terror.
The detonation had blown most of the flesh off of the bones of Oaks’s arm, and the doctors at Central Receiving Hospital on Sixth Street had amputated the limb at the shoulder.
Oaks had been put in the charity ward, with drunks and bar-fight casualties, and when he woke up after the surgery it wasn’t long before one of his wardmates expired of an infected knife wound.
And Oaks caught the ghost; ate it, assumed it, got a life. The explosion had cost him his arm, but it had also unblocked his psychic windpipe.
HE COULD do that again, any time; bottle one of the palindrome-confounded ghosts, bum a needle somewhere, and then shoot the lively ghost into his…leg, this time? Right arm? And then be missing two limbs. And what was to prevent the ghost from being propelled the short distance to his heart before it blew up?
Oaks was twitching with the urge to try once more to inhale a ghost. Maybe it would work now—now that the sun was up, now that he’d remembered all these things, now that his goddamn teeth ached so fiercely from being clenched that he couldn’t see why they didn’t crumble to rotten sand between his jawbones, which seemed intent on crashing through one another—maybe that’s why he was clamping them shut, because otherwise they’d stretch apart just as forcefully, swing all the way around and bite his head off—
No. He had proved that it didn’t work anymore, he couldn’t ingest ghosts the way he was right now. He would shoot one into a vein if he had to, before the Bony Express could crash in through the walls of his identity and make a shattered crack-webbed crazed imbecile of him…
But first he would see if Edison couldn’t undo what Edison could do. At least Edison was a ghost now, without the resources he’d had as a living person; and he didn’t have Henry Ford protecting him anymore.
Just some kid. Some bleeding kid.
Oaks sighed, flinching at the multitude of outraged and impatient voices that shook his breath. His trembling left hand wobbled to the compass-pommel of his knife, and brushed the bulk of the revolver under his untucked shirt. Three more shots in it. One for himself, if everything worked out as badly as it could and even a ghost injected right into a vein didn’t unjam him.
But I found the kid once, he thought dully. I can find him again. And I can make Edison tell me how to get unjammed.
And then I can eat him at last.
Oaks reached his hand into the pocket of his baggy camouflage pants and dug out his money. He had a five and three ones and about three dollars in change. Enough for bus fare south, and a can of bean soup.