“But the Sullivan guy is masked; deLarava said so; he ditched one of her top sniffers outside of Miceli’s yesterday. And the big ghost and the kid can mask each other, and Sherman Oaks is nothing but a walking mask—he’s got no name or birth date, and the ghosts inside him probably have more personality definition than he does. We’d never catch their ghosts in vials, they’d be everywhere, like a flashlight beam through a kaleidoscope.”
“I don’t care,” said Obstadt, opening another drawer and lifting out the thermoslike inhaler. “I want Oaks out of the picture, by which I mean dead. He’s not just a dealer, he’s fallen into the product and become a junkie, a heavy smoker, a rival. And I want deLarava working for me, severely subservient to me.” He laid the glass cartridge into the slot at the top of the inhaler. “Do you know why water in a bucket hollows out and climbs the walls and gets shallower when you spin the bucket real fast?”
Canov blinked. “Uh, centrifugal force.”
“No. Because there’s other stuff around, for it to be spinning in relation to; the room, the city, the world. If the bucket of water was the only thing in the universe, if it was the universe, the water would be still, and you couldn’t tell if it was spinning or not. Spinning compared to what? The question wouldn’t have any meaning.”
“Okay,” said Canov in a cautious tone.
“So—” So I’m tired of being hollowed out, thought Obstadt, and of climbing the walls, and of getting shallow. I’m tired of not being the only person in the universe. “So I need to contain them, don’t I? As long as they’re existing at all. DeLarava I can contain by just owning her.”
“She’s doing her shoot aboard the Queen Mary tomorrow,” Canov reminded him, “the Halloween thing, about ghosts on the ship. Anything about that?”
“Ummm…wait, on that. I don’t think there’s anything much on the Queen Mary right now. Let’s see how you do at finding these people before sundown tonight, hm?”
“Okay.” Canov visibly shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and he scratched his beard. “I’m sorry about not finding the other phone line sooner—we—”
“Get out of my sight,” said Obstadt gently, with a smile.
After Canov had tottered out the door, Obstadt leaned back in his chair and looked up into the cold blue vault of the sky, wishing that the tiny crucifix of a jet would creep across it, just to break up the monotony of it.
Then he sighed and twisted the valve on the inhaler. He heard the hiss as the pressure from the punctured cartridge filled the inside of the cylinder, and then he lifted the tube to his lips.
The hit was cold with nitrous oxide, but nausea-sweat sprang out on his forehead at the hard, static absence of the rotted thing that rode the rushing incoming stench and wedged itself hopelessly sideways in the breech of his mind. The back of Obstadt’s head hit the carpet as his chair went over backward, and then his knees banged against a bookcase and clattered sideways to the floor, and he was convulsing all alone on the carpet under the high blue sky.
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
“I love my love with an H,” Alice couldn’t help beginning, “because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous….”
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
AT eye-height on one of the glass shelves was a white bas-relief of Jesus done in reverse, with the face indented into a plaster block, the nose the deepest part—as if, Elizalde thought, Jesus had passed out face-first into a bowl of meringue. Someone had at some time reached into the hollow of the face to paint the eyes with painstaking lack of skill, and as Elizalde shuffled across the linoleum floor the head gave the illusion of being convex rather than concave, and seemed to swivel to keep the moronic eyes fixed on her.
What household out there, she asked herself nervously, is decorated to near perfection, lacking only this fine objet d’art to make it complete?
Frank Rocha's house had been full of things like that—prints of Our Lady of Guadalupe, tortured Jesuses painted luridly on black velvet. Elizalde nervously touched the bulge of her wallet in her back pocket.
The old woman behind the counter smiled at her and said, “Buenas días, mi hija. Cómo puedo ayudarte?”
“Quiero hacer reparaciones a un amigo muerto,” said Elizalde. How easy it was to express the idea, I want to make amends to a dead friend, in Spanish!
The woman nodded understandingly, and bent to slide open the back of a display case. Elizalde set down her grocery bag and clasped her hands together to still their trembling. Already she had stopped at a tiny corner grocery store and bought eggs and Sugar Babies and a pint of Myers rum and a cheap plastic compass with stickum on the back so that it could be glued to a windshield; and in another botánica she had bought a selection of herbs in cellophane packets, and oils in little square bottles, that she had been assured habría ojos abrir del polvo, would open eyes out of the dust—all of it had been set out on the counter in response to her request for something that would call up the dead.
Out of the display arrangement of stones and garish books and cheap metal medallions, the old woman now lifted a plastic bag that contained a sprig of dried leaves: YERBA BUENA read the hand-lettered sticker on the bag, and Elizalde didn’t even have to sniff it, just had to look at the dusty, alligator-bumpy leaves, to be surrounded by the remembered smell of mint; and, for the first time, she realized that the Spanish name meant good herb—over the generations her family had smoothed and elided the words to something that she would have spelled yerra vuena, which she had always taken to mean something like “fortunate error,” with the noun given an unusual feminine suffix.
“Incapácita las alarmas del humo en su apartamento,” the woman told her—quietly, though they were alone in the shop. “Hace un te cargado, con muchas hojas; anade algún licor, tequila o ron, y déjalo cocinar hasta que está seco, y deja las hojas cocinar hasta que están secas, y humando quemadas. Habla al humo.”
Elizalde nodded as she memorized the instructions—disable smoke alarms in the apartment, make a strong mint tea with booze in it, then cook it dry and let the leaves smoke, and talk to the smoke.
Jesus, she thought; and then in spite of herself she glanced at the disquieting bas-relief-in-reverse, which still seemed to be turned toward her, staring.
I still like “fortunate error,” she thought helplessly as she took the bag from the woman and handed her a couple of dollar bills. She tucked the dried mint into the bag with her other purchases, thanked the woman, and shuffled out of the store. Bells hung on the doorframe rang a minor chord out into the sunlight as she stepped down to the Beverly Boulevard sidewalk.