Chaplin had made a lot of movies at Echo Park for Keystone Studios, back in the nineteen-teens. Chaplin had been a magician who took extensive masking precautions, and his lifeline was a tangle here; every time a director had said, "Cut!" there was a jig in his line, and in 1914 Chaplin had even made a movie in which he had completely submerged in the lake, as if in a baptism. Lots of kinks and false stops.
And Golze had now lit up that old spiderweb camouflage pattern by wearing Chaplin's hat ribbon. Whenever Rascasse tried to focus on the boat, he found that he was instead looking away from the boat, in all directions at once. Even for a person as experienced in out-of-body perspectives as Rascasse, it was jarring and disorienting.
The elderly Frank Marrity squinted around in the sunlight at the palm and yellow-flowered acacia trees that ringed the little lake. From the boat on the water, he could see here and there a homeless person sleeping in the shade beside a shopping cart, and children and ducks on the asphalt walk that ringed the lake.
"Last time we talked," he said, "it was on a bus. Do you still have that bus?" He leaned forward as he spoke, to be heard over the clanging and squeaking of the mechanical toy animals Golze had set into motion on the curved boards below their feet.
"Yes." Golze rested on the oars, having propelled the orange-painted rowboat a good ten yards out from the shade of the roofed rental dock. He had loosened his tie and laid his tweed jacket across the blue vinyl cushion on the thwart between them, but his white shirt was already dark with sweat. For some reason the fat man was wearing a black ribbon choker, barely visible below his beard.
"When was this?" Golze asked.
A tin ape with a pair of cymbals had run down, and Golze picked it up and wound the key in its back. Luckily most of the toys were battery operated.
The old Frank Marrity shrugged as Golze set the rackety toy back down among its fellows. "It might have been right now, this date and this hour," Marrity said. "I don't recall, exactly. For me, subjectively, it was quite a while ago — I was thirty-five years old." He took a sip from his can of 7-Up, to which he had added enough vodka to dispel its coldness, and shuddered. The lake smelled like moss and algae and the breeze smelled like roof tar.
"I see," said Golze. "Things, events have deviated, from the way they originally happened? You can help keep these toys wound up."
"Of course they've deviated." Marrity carefully set his 7-Up on the thwart and then bent to pick up a dog with brown-and-white nylon fur and begin twisting its key. He wished he'd brought a hat; the sun overhead was hot on his scalp through his thinning gray hair. "For one thing, in my original experience of August 1987 my elderly father didn't visit me. That's who I've told my younger self that I am. My father. Our father. He believes it — I'm close enough to the right age, and of course I look like him, and I know the family history."
"So he hates you?"
Marrity frowned as he put the dog down. "I think he does. Though he's more civil than I would be, if I met the old man." Then with a shiver of loss he remembered that his father had been killed in 1955. "But of course the old man turns out not to be the bad guy we always thought he was." And who is now? he asked himself rhetorically. Got to have a bad guy.
"What did we talk about," Golze asked, "in the bus, when you were thirty-five?"
Marrity thought: You wanted Grammar's VHS movie, and I sold it to you. But the movie is gone, this time. And you also asked about Einstein's machine, which I didn't know about, then. Aloud he said, "You said you wanted to buy a machine my grandmother had, which had been designed by Albert Einstein."
"And?"
"And I sold it to you, for fifty thousand dollars." Close enough, he thought — I sold him the movie that time. "I want something else, besides money, this time."
Golze smiled, obviously pleased. "And there was the movie too."
"You mentioned a movie, but I didn't have that, whatever it was." He picked up a big red plastic ant that had stopped moving.
Golze's good cheer was gone. "The movie, it was watched at your house at four-fifteen P.M. two days ago! Before there were any divergences between your lifeline and your younger self's!"
That's right, thought Marrity, forcing himself not to reach for the 7-Up can. Instead he nervously twisted the key in the ant's belly. "Daphne — may have watched a movie — I was working—"
"Why are you lying? Your younger self has described it as a paranormal 'intrusion' that occurred at four-fifteen on Sunday." He leaned forward across the oars and smiled at Marrity, widening his eyes and showing his yellow teeth. "Why are you lying?"
Marrity exhaled. "Because it's gone, the movie's destroyed," he said, relieved to be admitting the truth. "In my original life nineteen years ago, I sold it to you, but in this time line the VCR burned up with the movie in it when Daphne was watching it."
"Burned up? You know it was burned up?"
"I saw the VCR in my, his, front yard. It was charred." The ant had begun writhing mechanically in his hands, and he hastily set it down.
"And her teddy bear was burned too," said Golze quietly. "And the stereo in Rascasse's car! Was this poltergeist? Telekenesis? Did she grab these things psychically?"
"I don't know. I wasn't there. She didn't have any psychic powers when she was my daughter."
"Poltergeist!" Golze shouted it like a curse.
The fat man picked up the oar handles and rowed furiously to a spot several yards farther out. Then he let go of them and rubbed his red face with both chubby hands as the boat surged on for a yard or two and then rocked to a stop on the green water.
Marrity peered around at the distant new apartment buildings beyond Alvarado Boulevard, and in the other direction at the rental dock's little lighthouse, which looked as if it dated from the 1920s. And a man from the twenty-first century sitting in a boat between them, he thought.
Finally Golze said, "I believe you," through his fingers. "All our remote viewers reported that it simply disappeared; not just stopped being used, but dropped out of their perceptions entirely." He lowered his hands and stared at Marrity. "Why would she have poltergeist powers in this time line?"
"I can't imagine. It's new to me."
"Tell me the truth about our meeting nineteen years ago."
"I can give you the machine."
"The meeting."
"Well, the blind girl was there, and after I gave you the movie, she stopped bothering to pretend she could see out of her own eyes. There were some vulgar jokes, when one of the men would go to the bathroom. She was pretty drunk, as I recall! And you had — I'm glad not to see it here — you had a mummified human head, which appeared to be alive." He squinted at Golze, but the fat man didn't seem surprised, so they must have it in this time line too. "It made noises and wiggled its jaw, anyway." He picked up the ape with the cymbals, which had run down again. "Like one of these toys. Why didn't you get all battery-operated ones?"
I'm talking too much, he thought as he wound it up. He put the ape down and took another sip of the lukewarm, fortified 7-Up and shifted on the blue vinyl cushion. He wondered if the cushions were supposed to serve as life preservers if the boat sank.
"The wind-up ones provide discontinuity," Golze said shortly. "So you gave us the Chaplin movie, when you were thirty-five."
"Right. A videocassette, labeled Pee-wee's Big Adventure, though that's not what the movie in the cassette was."
"Had you watched the movie?"
"No. My daughter did. Practically put her in a coma."
"I can imagine. And we asked you about the machine too?"