He was wearing blue jeans pants, for one thing, and a pair of sneakers on his feet . . . except they didn’t look like any sneakers I’d ever seen before. They were great big clumpy things. What they really looked like were the shoes Boris Karloff wears as part of his Frankenstein get-up, and if they were made of canvas, I’d eat my favorite Fedora. The word written up the sides in red script looked like the name of a dish on a Chinese carry-out menu: REBOK.
I looked down at the blotter which had once been covered with a tangle of telephone numbers, and suddenly realized that I could no longer remember Mavis Weld’s, although I must have called it a billion times only this past winter. That feeling of dread intensified.
‘Mister,’ I said, ‘I wish you’d state your business and get out of here. Come to think of it, why don’t you skip the talking and just go right to the getting-out part?’
He smiled . . . tiredly, I thought. That was the other thing. The face above the plain open-collared white shirt looked terribly tired. Terribly sad, as well. It said the man who owned it had been through things I couldn’t even dream of. I felt some sympathy for my visitor, but what I mostly felt was fear. And anger. Because it was my face, too, and the bastard had apparently gone a long way toward wearing it out.
‘Sorry, Clyde,’ he said. ‘No can do.’
He put his hand on that tiny, cunning zipper, and all at once Landry opening that case was the last thing in the world I wanted. To stop him I said, ‘Do you always go visiting your tenants dressed like a guy who makes his living following the cabbage crop? What are you, one of those eccentric millionaires?’
‘I’m eccentric, all right,’ he said. ‘And it won’t do you any good to draw this business out, Clyde.’
‘What gave you that ide — ‘
Then he said the thing I’d been dreading, and put out the last tiny flicker of hope at the same time. ‘I know all your ideas, Clyde. After all, I’m you.’
I licked my lips and forced myself to speak; anything to keep him from yanking that zipper.
Anything at all. My voice came out husky, but at least it did come out.
‘Yeah, I noticed the resemblance. I’m not familiar with the cologne, though. I’m an Old Spice man, myself.’
His thumb and finger remained pinched on the zipper, but he didn’t pull it. At least not yet.
‘But you like this,’ he said with perfect assurance, ‘and you’d use it if you could get it down at the Rexall on the corner, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, you can’t. It’s Aramis, and it won’t be invented for another forty years or so.’ He glanced down at his weird, ugly basketball shoes.
‘Like my sneakers.’
‘The devil you say.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose the devil might come into it somewhere,’ Landry said, and he didn’t smile.
‘Where are you from?’
‘I thought you knew.’ Landry pulled the zipper, revealing a rectangular gadget made of some smooth plastic. It was the same color the seventh-floor hall was going to be by the time the sun went down. I’d never seen anything like it. There was no brand name on it, just something that must have been a serial number: T-1000. Landry lifted it out of its carrying case, thumbed the catches on the sides, and lifted the hinged top to reveal something that looked like the telescreen
in a Buck Rogers movie. ‘I come from the future,’ Landry said. ‘Just like in a pulp magazine story.’
‘You come from Sunnyland Sanitarium, more like it,’ I croaked.
‘But not exactly like a pulp science-fiction story,’ he went on, ignoring what I’d said. ‘No, not exactly.’ He pushed a button on the side of the plastic case. There was a faint whirring sound from inside the gadget, followed by a brief, whistling beep. The thing sitting on his lap looked like some strange stenographer’s machine . . . and I had an idea that that wasn’t far from the truth.
He looked up at me and said, ‘What was your father’s name, Clyde?’
I looked at him for a moment, resisting an urge to lick my lips again. The room was still dark, the sun still behind some cloud that hadn’t even been in sight when I came in off the street.
Landry’s face seemed to float in the gloom like an old, shrivelled balloon.
‘What’s that got to do with the price of cucumbers in Monrovia?’ I asked.
‘You don’t know, do you?’
‘Of course I do,’ I said, and I did. I just couldn’t come up with it, that was all — it was stuck there on the tip of my tongue, like Mavis Weld’s phone number, which had been BAyshore something-or-other.
‘How about your mother’s?’
‘Quit playing games with me!’
‘Here’s an easy one — what high school did you go to? Every red-blooded American man remembers what school he went to, right? Or the first girl he ever went all the way with. Or the town he grew up in. Was yours San Luis Obispo?’
I opened my mouth, but this time nothing came out.
‘Carmel?’
That sounded right . . . and then felt all wrong. My head was whirling.
‘Or maybe it was Dusty Bottom, New Mexico.’
‘Cut the crap!’ I shouted.
‘Do you know? Do you?’
‘Yes! It was — ‘
He bent over. Rattled the keys of his strange steno machine.
‘San Diego! Born and raised!’
He put the machine on my desk and turned it around so I could read the words floating in the window above the keyboard.
‘San Diego! Born and raised!’
My eyes dropped from the window to the word stamped into the plastic frame surrounding it.
‘What’s a Toshiba?’ I asked. ‘Something that comes on the side when you order a Reebok dinner?’
‘It’s a Japanese electronics company.’
I laughed dryly. ‘Who’re you kidding, mister? The Japs can’t even make wind-up toys without getting the springs in upside down.’
‘Not now,’ he agreed, ‘and speaking of now, Clyde, when is now? What year is it?’
‘1938,’ I said, then raised a half-numb hand to my face and rubbed my lips.
‘Wait a minute — 1939.’
‘It might even be 1940. Am I right?’
I said nothing, but I felt my face heating up.
‘Don’t feel bad, Clyde; you don’t know because I don’t know. I always left it vague. The time-frame I was trying for was actually more of a feel . . . call it Chandler American Time, if you like. It worked like gangbusters for most of my readers, and it made things simpler from a copy-editing standpoint as well, because you can never exactly pinpoint the passage of time. Haven’t you ever noticed how often you say things like “for more years than I can remember” or “longer ago than I like to think about” or “since Hector was a pup”?’
‘Nope — can’t say that I have.’ But now that he mentioned it, I did notice. And that made me think of the LA Times. I read it every day, but exactly which days were they? You couldn’t tell from the paper itself, because there was never a date on the masthead, only that slogan which reads ‘America’s Fairest Newspaper in America’s Fairest City.’
‘You say those things because time doesn’t really pass in this world. It is . . . ‘ He paused, then smiled. It was a terrible thing to look at, that smile, full of yearning and strange greed. ‘It is one of its many charms,’ he finished.
I was scared, but I’ve always been able to bite the bullet when I felt it really needed biting, and this was one of those times. ‘Tell me what the hell’s going on here.’
‘All right . . . but you’re already beginning to know, Clyde. Aren’t you?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know my dad’s name or my mom’s name or the name of the first girl I ever went to bed with because you don’t know them. Is that it?’
He nodded, smiling the way a teacher would smile at a pupil who’s made a leap of logic and come up with the right answer against all odds. But his eyes were still full of that terrible sympathy.
‘And when you wrote San Diego on your gadget there and it came into my head at the same time . . . ‘
He nodded, encouraging me.
‘It isn’t just the Fulwider Building you own, is it?’ I swallowed, trying to get rid of a large blockage in my throat that had no intention of going anywhere. ‘You own everything.’
But Landry was shaking his head. ‘Not everything. Just Los Angeles and a few surrounding areas. This version of Los Angeles, that is, complete with the occasional continuity glitch or made-up addition.’