Tim Powers - Last Call (5 page)

His heart thudded in his chest like a pile driver breaking up old pavement. He knew he'd been dreaming about the game on the lake again, and that something in the real world had awakened him.

The nights were still chilly in March, and though the sun was now well up—it must have been nine or ten o'clock, at least—the can of Budweiser on the floor beside his bed was still cool. Crane popped the tab and drank half of it in one continuous series of gulps, then absently wiped a trickle of beer from the gray stubble on his chin.

The can had left a pale ring on the hardwood floor. Susan never criticized his drinking, but she didn't seem to like it in the bedroom; she'd pick up the can as casually as if it were a magazine or an ashtray and carry it out to the living room. After he noticed the habit, he had purposely set his Budweiser on the bedside table a few times, but her patient persistence had made him feel mean, and now he did it only accidentally.

The doorbell bonged, and he assumed that it had rung a few moments before, too. He levered himself up out of his side of the queen-size bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, then plodded out into the living room. Still buttoning his shirt, he opened the door; he never bothered to look through the peephole anymore.

His next-door neighbor Arky Mavranos was standing on the porch. "Ahoy, Pogo!" Mavranos said, waving two cans of Coors. "What
seeems
to be the
problem
!"

All this was Mavranos's standard greeting, so Crane didn't reply but just stepped outside, sat down in one of the porch chairs and accepted a beer from him. "Ah," Crane recited dutifully as he popped the cold can open and held the foaming thing to his ear, "the sound of breakfast cooking."

"Breakfast?" said Mavranos, grinning through his unkempt brown mustache. "Noon's gone—this is lunch."

Crane squinted out past the porch rail at the tower of the Fidelity Federal Savings building, silhouetted against the gray sky half a mile north on Main Street, but he couldn't focus on the flashing letters and numbers on its rooftop sign. The Norm's parking lot had enough cars in it to indicate the lunch crowd, though, and the daytime crows had replaced morning's wild parrots on the telephone lines. Mavranos was probably right.

"I brought your mail," Mavranos added, pulling a couple of envelopes out of his back pocket and dropping them onto the battered table.

Crane glanced at them. One was the long gray Bank of America envelope with the waxed paper address window—probably his statement. It was never current; if he wanted to know how much he still had in his savings account, he could just look at the slip that was spit out of the Versatel machine when it gave him his card back next time. He tossed the unopened envelope into the plastic trash can.

The other envelope was addressed in Susan's mother's handwriting. He tossed it away even faster.

"Just junk!" he said with a broad grin, draining the beer and getting up. He opened the door and went inside, and a few moments later was back in the chair with the half can of Budweiser that he had, in spite of himself, again left on the bedroom floor. "Wife off shopping?" asked Arky. Off shopping, Crane thought.

Susan loved those discount stores that were as big as airplane hangars. She always came home from them with bags of things like shark-shaped plastic clips to hold your beach towel down, and comical ceramic dogs, and spring-loaded devices you screwed onto your instant coffee jar that would, when you worked a lever on top, dispense a precise teaspoonful of powdered coffee. Her purchases had become a sort of joke among the neighbors.

Crane took a deep breath and then drained the Budweiser. This looked like being another serious drinking day. "Yeah," he answered, exhaling. "Potting soil, tomato cages … Spring's on us, gotta get stuff in the ground."

"
She
was up early."

Crane lowered his chin and stared at his neighbor expressionlessly.

After a pause he said, "Oh?"

"Sure was. I saw her out here watering the plants before the sun was even up."

Crane got dizzily to his feet and looked at the dirt in the nearest flower pot. It did look damp; had he watered the plants himself, yesterday or the day before? He couldn't remember.

"Back in a sec," he said evenly.

He went into the house again, and walked quickly down the hall to the kitchen. The kitchen was uncomfortably warm, as it had been for thirteen weeks now; but he didn't look at the oven—just opened the refrigerator and took out a cold can of Budweiser.

His heart was pounding again. Whom had Archimedes seen on the porch? Susan, as Crane could admit if he had a fresh beer in his hand and the alcohol was beginning to blunt his thoughts, was dead. She had died of a sudden heart attack—
fibrillation
—thirteen weeks ago.

She had been dead before the hastily summoned paramedics had even come sirening and flashing and squealing up to the curb out front. The medics had clomped into the house with their metal suitcases and their smells of rubber and disinfectants and after-shave and car exhaust, and they had used some kind of electric paddles to try to shock her heart into working again, but it had been too late.

After they had taken her body away, he had noticed her cup of coffee, still hot, on the table in front of the couch she'd died on—and he had numbly realized that he would not be able to bear it if the coffee were eventually to cool off, if it were to wind up as passively tepid as some careless guest's forgotten half can of soda pop.

He had carefully carried the cup down the hall to the kitchen and put it in the stove and turned the broiler on low. And he had told the concerned neighbors that Susan had fainted, and later in the day he had explained that she was back, but resting.

She
had covered for
him
often enough, calling his boss and saying he had the flu when all he really had was a touch of "inebriadiation sickness," as he had called hangovers.

In the ninety-one days since her death, he had been making excuses—"She's visiting her mother," "She's in the tub," "She's asleep," "Her boss called her in to work early today"—to explain each instance of her absence. He had been drinking instead of going to work for a while, and so by mid-afternoon or so he often half believed the excuses himself, and when he left the house, he'd often find himself pausing before he locked the front door behind him, unthinkingly waiting for her to catch up, imagining her fumbling with her purse or giving her hair a couple of final brush strokes.

He had not looked in the stove, for he knew he wouldn't be able to stand the sight of the cup cooked dry.

This was only his third beer for today, and it was already after noon, so he took a deep gulp.

Whom had Archimedes seen? "Before the sun was even up"—Crane had been asleep then, dreaming again about that long-ago game on the lake. Had the dream conjured up some frail ghost of Susan?

Or could the house itself generate some replica of her?

At this moment, as he stood swaying in the middle of the kitchen, it didn't strike him as completely impossible—or at least not
inconceivable
. Her personality was certainly imprinted on every room. Crane's foster father had quit-claimed the house to him in 1969, ten years before Susan had moved in, but neither the young Crane nor his foster father before that had seen a table as anything more than a thing to stack stuff on, nor any sort of sturdy chair as being preferable to another; pictures on the walls had just been snapshots or pages scissored from art books, thumbtacked to the dry wall.

Now there were curtains and carpets and unmottled walls and refinished bookcases that didn't look as though they'd been bought in thrift stores—though in fact most of them had been.

He sniffed the warm kitchen air, which still seemed to carry the scent of coffee. "Susan?" he whispered.

There was a faint rustling from down the hall, probably in the bedroom.

He jumped and lost his footing and sat down heavily on the floor, and cold beer splashed out onto the tiles. "Nothing," he said softly, not daring to believe that he was talking to anyone besides himself. "I'm cleaning it up." He bent forward and wiped up the foamy drops with his flannel-sleeved forearm.

He knew ghosts were impossible—but lately a lot of impossible things had seemed to happen to him.

On a rainy midnight recently he had been sitting in his chair in the living-room corner—he could never sleep on rainy nights—and he'd been absently staring across the room at the dead philodendron hanging limp over the rim of its pot; and suddenly he had lost all sense of depth and scale—or, more precisely, he had seen that distance and size were illusions. Behind the apparent diversities that distinguished plant tendrils from things like river deltas and veins and electric arcs, there were, dimly perceptible in the fog of true randomness, shapes that stood constant, shapes that made up the invisible and impalpable skeleton of the universe.

He had been holding a glass of scotch, and he took a deep gulp—and the whisky seemed to become a whirlpool in him, sucking him down into some kind of well that was no more physical than the abstractable
shape
of the philodendron had been; and then the scope widened and his individuality was gone, and he knew, because knowing was part of being in this place, that this was the level everyone shared, the very deep and broad pool—the common water table—that extended beneath all the individual wells that were human minds.

There were universal, animating
shapes
down here, too, far away in the deepest regions—vast figures as eternal-but-alive as Satan entombed in the ice in Dante's
Inferno
, and they were ritualistically changing their relationships to one another, like planets moving around the sun, in a dance that had been old long before the early hominids had found things to fear in the patterns of stars and the moon in the night sky.

And then Crane was nothing but a wave of horror rushing away, toward the comfort of close boundaries, up toward the bright, active glow that was consciousness.

And somehow when he surfaced, he had found himself in a blue-lit restaurant, a forkful of fettucine Alfredo halfway to his mouth. Smells of garlic and wine rode the coldly air-conditioned breeze, and someone was languidly playing "The Way We Were" on a piano. Something was wrong with the set of his body—he looked down and saw that he had female breasts.

He felt his mouth open and say, in an old woman's voice, "Wow, one of them's ripe—I'm getting a real clear flash from him."

I came up through the wrong well,
he thought, and forced himself away, back down into the blackness—and when he was once more aware of his surroundings, he was in his own living room again, with the rain thumping against the dark window and scotch spilled all down his shirt.

And only a few days ago he had been sitting on the front porch with Mavranos, and Arky had waved his beer can at all the Hondas and Toyotas driving busily up Main Street. "Suits," Arky had said, "going to offices. Ain't you glad we don't have to wake up to alarm clocks and scoot off to shuffle papers all day?"

Crane had nodded drunkenly. "
Dei bene fecerunt inopis me pusilli
," he had said, "
quodque fecerunt animi
."

Mavranos had stared at him. "What
seeems
to be the
problem
?"

"Hmm?"

"What did you say, just then?"

"Uh … I said, 'The gods did well when they made me lacking in ideas and in spirit.' "

"I didn't know you spoke Latin. That was Latin, wasn't it?"

Crane had taken a deep sip of beer to quell a moment of panic. "Oh. Sure. A little. You know, Catholic schools and all."

Actually he had never been a Catholic, and knew no Latin beyond legal terms picked up from mystery novels. And what he'd said didn't sound like any part of the Catholic Mass he'd ever heard about.

Sitting on the kitchen floor now, he put the beer down and wondered if he was simply going insane—and if it made any difference.

He thought about going into the bedroom.

What if there's some form of her in there, lying on the bed?

The thought both frightened and excited him. Not yet, he decided—that might be like opening an oven door before a soufflé is done. The house probably needs time to exude all of her accumulated essence. Fossils need time to form.

He struggled wearily to his feet and brushed the gray hair back from his forehead. And if it's not
quite
her, he thought, I won't mind. Just so it's close enough to fool a drunk.

On the oven-hot sidewalk of Las Vegas Boulevard, just across the highway from the fountains and broad colonnade of Caesars Palace, Betsy Reculver paused and sniffed the desert air. The wrinkles in her cheeks and temples deepened as she narrowed her eyes.

The very old man walking beside her kept hobbling along, and she reached out and caught his sleeve. "Halt your ass a sec, Doctor," she said loudly. Several brightly dressed tourist women stared at her as they walked rapidly past.

The old man who was known as Doctor Leaky had apparently not heard. For a couple of seconds he tried to continue walking, then seemed to grasp the fact that he was being impeded by something. His bald, spotty head slowly turned around on his corded neck, and his eyes widened as if in vast astonishment when he saw that Betsy had taken hold of his sleeve. "Hah?" he said hoarsely. "Hah?" He was wearing an expensive gray suit, but somehow he always tugged the pants up too high. Right now the silver belt buckle was up around his solar plexus. And of course he could never manage to lift his slack lower jaw and close his mouth.

"Can't you smell it anymore, you worthless old jug?
Sniff.
" sShe inhaled deeply.

"It's them!" exclaimed Doctor Leaky in his shrill, birdy voice.

She looked at him hopefully, but he was pointing at several life-size painted statues of men in togas under the Caesars Palace sign across the street. A tourist had wedged a Bic lighter into the outstretched hand of one of them and was having his picture taken leaning close to it with a cigarette in his mouth.