by Gant, Gene
And that other miracle I mentioned? I felt tremendously happy that he was healed and would be able to go on with his life. My soul felt lighter too.
I BEAMED down to Mexico. There were lots of poor, hungry people and lots of sick, dying people who didn’t have money to pay for medical care. Using the orb’s power, I turned rocks, garbage, sticks—anything that was lying around—into food and clothes that materialized in huge piles in the streets of impoverished neighborhoods. Some of the residents fought with each other over the stuff I provided. I made lightning flash across the sky and told them to be nice and share or I’d take everything away. That calmed things down. Then I went to several of the country’s hospitals, healing as many people as I could.
Three hours later, I was awfully tired again. I beamed back to the States. The feds and the cops were still watching my house, so I couldn’t go there. (The FBI was inside at that very moment, searching through the place.) I needed a place to crash for several hours where I wouldn’t have to pay to stay or worry about anyone storming in to take me into “protective” custody. The anger I’d felt at the police came back in full force. Then I remembered how close I had come to forcing those Memphis police officers to kill each other. At the same time, I felt ashamed for what I had done, and I didn’t understand why. I was also very worried when I remembered how I’d wanted to lash out at cops in general. So, in addition to a safe space, I also needed a friendly ear to help me sort out some things.
The solution came to me quickly. I switched directions and headed for Antonio’s house.
17
I TUNED in on Antonio’s thoughts as I approached. He was sitting on a stool at one of the counters in his kitchen. Cooking dinner was a chore that, in the Reyes household, rotated from person to person. It wasn’t Antonio’s day to cook, but he’d volunteered. His dad, happy to be relieved of the obligation, was stretched out in the recliner in the den, watching one of those old Bruce Lee movies. Antonio felt nervous. When he felt nervous, he put himself to work as a way of mellowing out.
He’d planned a simple menu: asopao, spinach and tomato salad, garlic bread. His asopao—a kind of gumbo that included stuff like chicken, shrimp, pigeon peas, olives, peppers, and tomatoes—was a household favorite. The recipe was his grandmother’s, which she had brought from Puerto Rico when she moved to Miami in 1965. He was chopping onions into a large metal bowl when my body appeared silently in the room behind him. I took off the shades, hanging them on the collar of my T-shirt. Then I stood there and waited, not so much out of patience as from a need to get my own volatile mood under control. Antonio swung around on the stool, reached for the freshly washed bell pepper he’d left in the sink, and finally caught sight of me.
“God!” he barked in surprise. The bell pepper flew out of his hand and hit the wall over the stove, splitting open with a muffled pop.
“Antonio?” his dad called out. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I’m okay,” Antonio called back. “Sorry I yelled.” He gave me a strange, unreadable look. “Micah. I didn’t see you come in,” he whispered. “How—?”
“Your back door was open,” I whispered back, grateful that we were keeping our voices down. I was very tired and didn’t feel up to socializing with Antonio’s dad just yet. I retrieved the burst pepper and handed it to him. “I saw you through the window there and let myself in.”
“Man, I’m glad you stopped by,” he replied. “I’ve wanted to talk to you.”
I needed some time alone with Antonio. His mother, who had chosen to teach during the summer session, was in the classroom with a couple of kids who needed help with math and wouldn’t be home from work for another two hours. His father had taken the day off. Through the orb, I sent his father a message.
“Hey, Tony,” Mr. Reyes called out.
“Yeah, Dad?”
“I’m going to the library.”
Antonio was puzzled by that. “The library? You haven’t been there in years. You read e-books.”
“Well… I have this sudden urge to browse. I’ll be back in time for dinner.” There was the sound of footsteps and jingling keys, followed by the thump of the front door shutting.
Antonio turned back to me. “Parents. Go figure.” He frowned as he looked at me. “Hey, are you okay?”
“Not really.” I was shaking from a combination of exhaustion and anxiety. “Is there a place where I can lie down?”
“Come on.” He stood up, quickly wiped his hands on a towel, and put an arm around my shoulders. He guided me from the kitchen to the family room, where Mr. Reyes had been watching television. The movie was still on. He sat down on the sofa with me, still holding on to me. With his free hand, he grabbed the remote control and turned off the television. I leaned against him, trembling.
“You’re so scared,” Antonio said. He began rubbing my arm with his hand, trying to comfort me. “What’s wrong, Micah? What happened?”
Suddenly, I wanted to cry. It made me even angrier with myself. I put my hand over my mouth and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to fight back the tears.
“It’s okay, man. It’s okay.” Antonio stroked the side of my face with his fingers. The motions were soothing. We sat that way for several minutes, and I calmed down a bit. I pulled my hand from my mouth and cuddled against his side, keeping my eyes closed.
I slept for almost an hour. It wasn’t enough sleep to completely rejuvenate me, but it helped. I yawned. Then I felt Antonio’s hand under my chin. He lifted my face, and I opened my eyes. He looked down at me. “Are you feeling better now?”
I nodded. He kept looking at me. His big brown eyes were soft, filled with compassion and a puppy-like affection. I didn’t have to access his thoughts to know what he suddenly wanted to do. He leaned down slowly and pressed his lips to mine. I didn’t protest. As he pulled back, he studied my face for a reaction. I was too tired to do much of anything, so I just sort of lay there. He leaned down again. Just as he brushed his lips against mine to begin a new kiss, I pressed my hand to his chest and stopped him. He pulled back.
“Micah…,” he whispered in a quiet plea. He leaned toward me once more.
I turned my face away. “Antonio, don’t do that.”
“But—”
“I’m not into guys, man.”
“I know. It’s just… I want you to be happy.”
“Right now, I’m a long way from happy.”
“You came here to talk, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but you said you had something you wanted to tell me, so you go first.” I stretched my body out on the sofa, resting my head in Antonio’s lap.
He stroked my head in a motion gentle enough to lull me to sleep. I suppressed a yawn and looked up at him. His eyes got that affectionate gaze again. It meant a lot that he obviously still cared about me. Under different circumstances, we might have been more than friends. But that wasn’t our reality; we were who we were.
I sighed and said, “So talk.”
He looked suddenly uncomfortable. “The news has been full of reports, man, about you. Reporters have been flashing your face all over the place. They say you’re connected to all these people who were healed, brought back from the dead….” He paused, uncertain. “Why would they attach you to crazy talk like that?”
I knew that if I simply told Antonio about my dying and coming back to life with the powers and abilities of a god, he’d react in the manner such a tale required. He would laugh and tell me I had lost my damn mind. Then I’d have to go through the trouble of proving everything. Rather than endure that, I poured my memories into his head, simultaneously manipulating his emotions so he wouldn’t be overwhelmed by it all.
Antonio’s body went still, his expression shifting into one of focused listening. The end result was that he absorbed and accepted the fact of my new existence without shock or denial. When I withdrew from his mind, he smiled at me, his eyes filling with this weird adoration that was more disconcerting than his kisses or any rude comments
he might have made about my sanity.
“You have the power of God,” he said with amazement.
“No, I have access to some godlike tech.”
Expressions shifted rapidly over Antonio’s face, going from amazement to rapture. “You could do great things with that kind of power,” he said. Then he goggled as an incredible idea struck him. “You could save souls!”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, brushing aside the idea and stopping him just as he was getting cranked up. I sat up. “Damn, Tony, I gave you some of my memories. Don’t you see what I almost did? I came this close to killing twelve cops. And I might’ve gone farther than that. I was mad enough to kill every cop on the planet.”
Antonio frowned as the memory of my cop encounter at the Oak Court Mall rose up in his head. For an instant, he believed it was one of his own memories, and he flushed with the helpless anger I felt when I remembered the event. He shook it off.
“I can understand why you have a grudge against the police, Micah,” he said. “But you can’t go around using this power for revenge. You have to forgive and let things go.”
“I am not you, Saint Tonio. You didn’t get your ass kicked the way I did, by my dad, by all those bastards in school. Maybe if you had, you wouldn’t be sitting there telling me to ‘forgive and let things go.’”
“That doesn’t make what I told you any less true, man.”
I hate it when I’m completely unreasonable and the person I’m talking to is the exact opposite. Then I wondered: had I forgiven Cedric? Is that why I healed him? Is that why I felt so light and happy, seeing how crazy ecstatic he and his parents became when his injuries were gone?
I quietly banged the back of my big head on the wall. “How do I do this forgive and forget thing, man?”
Antonio smiled. “Pray.”
I turned my head, giving him a wryly skeptical look.
“Hey, you asked, I answered,” he said with a shrug. “That’s how I fight temptation. Where I’m weak, I know God is strong. If you ask for his help, God is there for you.”
“I prayed for my pops to be a good man and bring his butt back home to my mama. He never did. I prayed for my mama to be healed when she had that stroke. I prayed harder for that than I’d ever prayed for anything in my life. But she still died. I don’t pray anymore, man.”
“Come on, Micah. You know we don’t always get what we pray for. Some things just aren’t meant to be. You do realize that God’s given you a mission. He brought you back with this power for a reason.”
I wasn’t so sure about all that, but I didn’t want to offend Antonio by knocking his beliefs. Instead, I let the conversation slip back into a topic I really didn’t want to get into.
“I always figured you had this strong will, man, and that was how you kept yourself from getting sexual and drinking beer and smoking and all the stuff the other kids were into at school. But you… kissed me. You kissed me more than once.”
“You know I like you, Micah,” he said. “I’ve always liked you. If you’re wondering if I want to have sex with you, the answer is yes, I do. And that’s okay. I’m human, and that’s a natural human feeling. The important question is, would I have sex with you? The answer to that is no. If you were into guys, if you were into me, I’d date you. I’d kiss you and hold you. But I’m saving sex until marriage.”
We heard the front door open and close. There was movement off to our left, and we both turned as Antonio’s father walked into the family room. Antonio looked very much like his dad, who was about three inches taller and had tinges of gray in his mustache and hair. He was surprised to see me.
“Oh. I see you have some company, Tony,” Mr. Reyes said. He paused, trying to remember my name. “Mikey? Is that you? You haven’t been around in ages. How’ve you been?”
“Good, sir.”
“Staying out of trouble?”
“I’m trying to, sir.” From his recent memories, I knew he had seen the same news report that Antonio had seen, but Mr. Reyes never suspected that the boy depicted in the drawing shown in the report was the same one sitting in his house now.
“Good. Well, I didn’t mean to interrupt.” Mr. Reyes started to withdraw. He looked at me again, his gaze sharpening. “You sure you’re all right, Mikey? You look as if you’re coming down with something.”
“I’m okay, sir. I’m just tired.”
“You kids. You gotta take better care of yourselves. Anyway, I’ll let you boys get back to your conversation.” Mr. Reyes grabbed an apple from the bowl on the coffee table and was gone.
My body felt as if it were deflating. I put my head back against the wall again. “I gotta go,” I mumbled. With a groan, I got to my feet.
Antonio stared at me, trying to read my emotional state. “You’re not going to… hurt any cops, are you?”
“Nah. I guess talking to you calmed me down. But I gotta get moving.”
“You can’t go yet, man. There’s a lot I need to ask you. And you really don’t look so good all of a sudden.”
“I need rest, and I need food. Using this god-machine takes a lot out of me. And for some reason, the machine won’t fix me up when I get worn down like this. I have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
Antonio stood up. “Well, why don’t you crash here? You can lie down in my room. I’ll wake you up when I finish cooking, and you can have dinner with us.”
“Thanks, Tony, but I really have to go. There are a lot of people out there suffering. I gotta help them, as many as I can. I’ll rest up later.” I started walking toward the kitchen, and that seemed to drain the strength I’d gained from my nap. Groaning again, I slid onto the stool where Antonio had been chopping vegetables and slumped over the counter.
“Here, man.” Antonio hurried across the room to the refrigerator. “At least have something to drink.”
“You got some Kool-Aid?”
“You need milk.”
My body seemed to be getting heavier by the minute. I couldn’t even gather the energy to open my eyes. I could hear Antonio as he bustled about the kitchen. Seconds later, he was at my side again, teaspoon clinking against glass as he stirred up some concoction.
“Drink this,” he said.
Without looking, I took the glass and drank. Whatever he had given me tasted almost like a strawberry shake, without the thick, clumpy texture. “Hey. This is good.”
“I put in one of my mom’s instant breakfast mixes,” Antonio said.
He watched to make sure I finished the entire glass. He didn’t have to bother, as I downed the stuff in two gulps.
I felt better when I was done, still tired but not near zombiehood like before. “Thanks, Tony.” I put the glass on the counter and stood up.
He kept looking at me, clearly wanting me to stay. “When you’re done doing whatever this is you feel you need to do,” he said solemnly, “will you come back so we can talk some more?”
“I will.”
He flinched away from me as I dissolved in a shimmer of energy. My molecules surged through the wall of his kitchen. As I moved away at near light speed, I could sense Antonio turning his gaze skyward, eyes staring. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost say it looked like he was scheming.
18
ON THE psychic level, violent emotion grabs attention the way a shout does in a quiet room. As I was beaming away from Antonio’s, a pulse of rage seven hundred miles away poured into me.
It had begun at the corner of Mack and Fischer on Detroit’s east side, in front of the blackened brick husk of a three-story building that had burned during the race riots of the sixties. Six young guys—three of them African American, three of them white—were hanging out there for lack of anything more constructive to do. One of the black guys was Delroy Pease, eighteen years old, a dude of medium height and build. He was decked out in a set of baggy, navy-blue denims and a sweat-stained tank top. He sported platinum on his two front uppers, three tiny gold hoops in his left ear, and a scar across his Adam’s ap
ple.
Also in the pack was James “T-Bo” Dyson, a nineteen-year-old white guy who was a few inches taller than Delroy. T-Bo wore loose jeans cinched below his butt with a thick, studded belt, displaying dirty stars-and-stripes boxers either in a fit of patriotism or a commentary on the state of the union. He didn’t wear a shirt, so proud was he of his bony, hairy upper body. The group’s pontifications on true manliness were proceeding smoothly until T-Bo, turning to admire the impressive curves of a passing young woman, stepped on Delroy’s left shoe.
“Fool, get off my foot!” Delroy helped T-Bo along with a vicious shove in the back. One of their more sensitive companions evidently found this degrading. He remarked with a snort, “Dang, T-Bo, you gonna take that?”
T-Bo leaped at Delroy, who handily kicked his butt. Twice humiliated now in front of his boys and highly pissed about the situation, T-Bo ran a half block down Mack to his parked car. Delroy suspected the dude, in the time-honored tradition of those whose asses have been kicked, was going for a weapon. But Delroy didn’t want to punk out in front of the posse, so he stood his ground.
These were not Detroit’s brightest.
Sure enough, T-Bo hauled a .357 out of his trunk. When he swung around with the gun, Delroy’s discretion finally kicked in, and he bolted up Fischer. The rest of the posse scattered for cover. Delroy knew he’d be nothing more than a running bull’s eye once T-Bo rounded the corner, so he cut across the lawn of the closest house and hurtled onto the porch, intending to take refuge inside.
Two women sat in the cool shade of that porch. One was middle-aged but looked almost girlish in pink knee-length shorts and a pink blouse. The other woman was twenty-one and very slim, wearing a breezy red sundress. She was bottle-feeding a chocolate drop of a newborn.
Both women screamed when Delroy invaded their porch. T-Bo stumbled into the yard just as Delroy reached the door. T-Bo saw the women and the baby. T-Bo realized they were in the line of fire.