Tim Powers - Last Call (11 page)

Only when he noticed the Porsche for the third time did Crane remember another piece of Ozzie's advice—
Three-sixty at all times—they can be in front just as easy as behind.

Driving east on the Santa Monica Freeway in the pre-dawn darkness, the moon long since set and the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles standing up off to his left like the smoldering posts of some god's burned-down house, Crane had been seized with the idea of just staying eastbound on this freeway; cruising right on past where it became called the Pomona Freeway, and all the way out past Ontario and Mira Loma to where it joined with the 15 in one of those weird, dusty semi-desert suburbs with names like Norco and Loma Linda, and then straight on up to Las Vegas.

Be in Vegas in time for a late breakfast,
he had found himself thinking.
And you've got two grand in your pocket.

He had known he didn't want to go anywhere besides home, much less to Las Vegas, but still he had had to fight the compulsion and concentrate on turning south onto the Santa Ana Freeway.

And then he had seen the Porsche for the third time.

There were only a few cars on the freeway at this hour, and he'd been able to swoop through the long dark curves with just three fingertips swinging the bottom of the steering wheel, but now he snapped the seat belt across himself and took the wheel firmly in both hands.

The Porsche was ahead of him now, as the two cars drove past the Long Beach Freeway junction. It seemed to Crane that it had been behind him or ahead of flanking for at least ten minutes. If Ozzie had been driving right now, he would have sped up and got in the fast lane and then done a squealing three-lane change to get off at Atlantic, and then taken some long way home.

But Crane was exhausted. "No, Ozzie," he said aloud. "I can't be spooking at every car making the same trip I am." He sighed. "But tell you what, I'll watch him, okay?"

The swooping overhead lights gleamed on the Porsche's body but not on its rear window. Frowning with the effort of focusing, Crane realized that the Porsche didn't
have
a rear window.

Cold night and a well-kept Porsche, he thought, but no back window?

He imagined Ozzie sitting beside him.
Heads up
, the old man would have said. "Right, Ozzie," Crane replied, and peered at the car ahead.

And so he saw the driver twist around and extend his arm out across the back of the seat, and he saw a gleam of metal in the hand.

Crane flung himself sideways across the seat as the windshield imploded with an ear-stunning
bang
. Tiny cubes of windshield glass sprayed across him, and the headwind was a cold, battering gale in the car as he pulled the wheel strongly to the right. He braced his feet and sat up, then just winced and held on.

The Torino hit the shoulder hard, tearing up ice plant as the old shocks clanked shut and the car dug in for an instant and then sprang up with the impetus of its own weight. As soon as the heavy old vehicle slewed to a stop, he shoved the shift lever into reverse and tromped on the accelerator and wove the lumbering machine down off the slope and back along the blessedly empty slow lane to the last off ramp.

Back in drive, he sped down Atlantic Boulevard, squinting in the headwind. After tracing a maze path through the dark streets, he pulled into the parking lot of a closed gas station and turned off the lights. He pulled the revolver out of his belt and watched the street.

His heart was thudding in his chest, and his hands were trembling wildly. There was a half-finished pint of Wild Turkey in the glove compartment, and after a minute or two he fumbled it out and twisted off the cap and took a deep gulp.

Jesus, he thought. It has not ever been closer. It has not ever been closer.

Eventually he put the car back into gear and drove south all the way to Pacific Coast Highway and then took Brookhurst up to Westminster. The car leaned perceptibly to the right now, and he wondered what he had done to the suspension and alignment.

"What
seeems
to be the
problem?
" whispered Archimedes Mavranos.

He sat on Scott Crane's porch in the darkness and listened to his own heart. He had read in an Isaac Asimov article that humans averagely got two billion heartbeats, and he calculated that he had used up only one billion.

It wasn't fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn't delivered like the mail.

He reached down and took hold of his current can of Coors. He had read that Coors was anti-carcinogenic—it had no nitrosamines, or something—and so he drank it constantly.

God knew why Crane drank Budweiser constantly. Mavranos hadn't heard anything about Budweiser.

Spit in the palm of your hand and then whack it with your other fist, he thought, and watch which way the spit flies. Then you know which way to go.

Mavranos had dropped out of high school when his fiancée had got pregnant, and for nearly twenty years he had made a pretty good living by buying cars from the Huntington Beach police impound yard and fixing them up and selling them for a profit. Only last April had he started studying science and math and myth.

April is the cruellest month,
he thought.

Last April he had gone to a doctor because he was getting tired all the time, and had no appetite anymore, and had a lump under his left ear.

"What seems to be the problem?" the doctor had asked cheerfully.

What had turned out to be the problem was lymphoma, cancer of the lymphatic system.

The doctor had explained it to some extent, and Mavranos had done a lot of reading on his own. He had learned about the random nature of cancer cells, and had then studied randomness—and he had begun to discern the patterns that underlay true randomness: the branchings, the repeating patterns, the fat man in the complex plane.

A car turned down Main from Seventeenth, but it wasn't Crane's Torino.

If you were to decide to measure the coastline of California, it would be of little use simply to lay a ruler across a page of an atlas and then determine the length of the roughly ten degrees of longitude it spanned. But it would be of even less value to walk the length of the coastline with a one-inch stick, taking into account every open tide pool and shoe-size peninsula; if you measured
too
finely, in fact, your answer could approach infinity. Every little pool, if you measured finely enough, had a virtually infinite coastline.

You had to approach such things differently.

You had to back off just far enough.

Turbulence in a water pipe or disorder in the signals to the nerves of the heart—or the cellular hysteria called cancer—were effects of randomness. And if you could … find the patterns in randomness, maybe you could manipulate them. Change them, restore the order.

Spit in the palm of your hand and whack it, he thought.

And he had found this neighborhood, this house, Scott Crane.

Crane never washed his Torino, and Mavranos had noticed patterns in the dew-streaked dust and the splashing of bird shit on the car body—circles, and straight lines and right angles on a sloping surface, and once a spatter of little wailing faces like that Munch picture—and once, when Crane had been standing on the porch, blearily going through his pocket change for a quarter to buy a newspaper, he had dropped a handful of dimes and quarters and pennies—Mavranos had helped pick them up, and had noticed that every coin had landed heads side up; and any watch Crane wore would run too fast.

And animals died around this house. Mavranos had once noticed dead ants in a line that pointed to a forgotten third of a cheeseburger on the porch, and a neighbor's cat that frequently used to sleep on Crane's roof had died; Mavranos had gone over to the woman's house, ostensibly to commiserate, and had learned that the veterinarian had diagnosed cancer as the cause of death.

And throughout the whole block fruit juices fermented abnormally fast, as though some god of wine visited this Santa Ana street and breathed on the houses, very late at night when he'd be seen by no one but the furtive youths out to steal car stereos and batteries.

Since it was randomness that was out to kill him, Archimedes Mavranos had decided to find out where it lived, find its castle, its perilous chapel. And so a year ago he had withdrawn five thousand dollars in twenties and put it in his pocket, told his wife and two daughters that he would be back when he had retaken his health, and had walked away down the street. At the corner he had spit in his hand and punched it with his fist, and then started away in the indicated direction.

He had walked for two full days, eating beef jerky he bought in liquor stores and pissing behind bushes and not shaving or changing his clothes or sleeping at all. Eventually he had found himself circling this block, and when he saw a house for rent, he had called the number on the sign out front and given the landlord fifteen hundred dollars in cash. And then he had devoted his efforts to fine-tuning.

He had come to suspect early on that Scott Crane was the major local signpost to the castle of randomness—but only tonight, when Crane had mentioned having been a professional Poker player, had he found any reason to be confident. Gambling was the place where statistics and profound human consequences met most nakedly, after all, and cards, even more than dice or the numbers on a roulette wheel, seemed able to define and perhaps even dictate a player's … luck.

Crane's living-room window was open behind the screen, and Mavranos now sensed someone standing inside, behind him. He shifted around in the chair.

"Scott?" came a whisper. "Come to bed."

"It's me, Susan, Arky," said Mavranos, embarrassed. "Scott's still off at his … whatever he's doing."

"Oh." Her whisper was weaker. "My eyes aren't very good yet. Don't … tell him I spoke to you, okay?"

She added something else, but it was too faint for him to hear.

"I'm sorry?"

He could hear her take a deep breath, like wind sighing through a leafless tree, but when she whispered again, he was only just able to hear it.

"Give him a drink," she said, and added some more words, all he caught of which were the syllables
back us
.

"Sure, Susan," Archimedes said uncomfortably. "You bet."

The next car to turn onto Main was Crane's Ford, and Mavranos stood up, for the windshield was just a white webbed skirt around a gaping hole on the driver's side.

"I just want to go to bed, man," Crane said. He had brought the pint bottle with him from the car. "Well, okay, one beer to chase this stuff with." He took a cold can and sat down heavily in one of the decrepit porch chairs.

Mavranos had been saying something. "What, now?" said Crane. "A fat man in the desert?"

Mavranos closed his eyes, then started again. "A song about a fat man who drives along the highways that cross the Mojave. The 40, the 15, even the one 27 out by Shoshone. A country-western song is how I've heard it, though I guess there's a rock one, too. This fat man's got a warty bald head, and his car has about a million rearview mirrors on it, like the mods in England used to hang on their scooters."

Scott Crane finished the bottle and put it down carefully on the table. "So the question is, have I heard about him?" He shook his head. "No. I haven't heard about him."

"Well, he's not real. He's a—a
legend
, you know? Like the Flying Dutchman or the Wandering Jew. His car is supposed to break down all the time, because the carburetor's just a wonder of extra hoses and valves and floats and clips and stuff."

Crane frowned and nodded, as if to show that he was understanding all this. "And you say he's green?"

"No, damn it.
No.
He
used
to be green, and just a
big
man, not fat, but that version stopped applying sometime. That image stopped being vital, and you see it now only in things like the Hulk, and the Jolly Green Giant who grows vegetables. Now he's not the Green Knight that Sir Gawain met anymore—because the water's sick and the land's barren, like in Second Kings—now he's real fat, and he's generally black or gray or even metallic. That little round robot Tik-Tok in the Wizard of Oz stories, that's him, a portrait of him." Mavranos looked at his sodden companion and wondered why he was even bothering to explain. "But you haven't heard of him."

"No. The only fat man I know about," said Crane, pausing in mid-sentence to take a long sip of the beer, "is the one that shot the moon in the face in 1960."

"
Tell me about that
."

Crane hesitated, then shook his head. "I'm kidding, it's just a—a John Prine song."

Some people shouted at each other in the Norm's parking lot, then got into cars; headlights came on, and they drove out onto Main and away into the night.

Mavranos stared at Crane. "Rebar, you said."

"Yeah, rebar. A goddamn iron pole. Fell off a truck. If I hadn't ducked to the side, it would have punched a hole right through my head. I should have got a name off the side of the truck; I could sue 'em."

"And you threw it away."

"Well, I couldn't drive, could I, with it stuck through my car?"

"This fat man," Mavranos went on after a pause, "like I said, he's not real, he's a
symbol
."

"Of course he is," Crane agreed vaguely; "of basketballs, or Saturn, or something."

"Why did you mention Saturn?"

"Jesus, Arky, I don't know. I'm exhausted. I'm drunk. Saturn's round, and so are fat men."

"He's the Mandelbrot man."

"Good. That's good to hear. I was afraid he was the Pillsbury doughboy. I've really got to—"

"Do you know what the Mandelbrot man is? No? I'll tell you." Mavranos took another sip of his own beer to ward away the cancer. "If you draw a cross on a piece of paper and call the crossing-point zero, and you mark one-two-three and so on to the right, and minus one, minus two, and all to the left, and one-times-the-square-root-of-minus-one and then two times that and then three times that upward from zero, and that times minus one, and minus two, and so forth, below the zero point, you wind up with a plane, and any point on it can be defined by two numbers, just like defining a place by latitude and longitude. And then—"