Inside a Silver Box

by Walter Mosley

  * * *

  JEREMY VALENTINE DIDN’T know anything about silver boxes, street thugs, or murdered philosophers-in-training. He was once a top earner at AIB, Alamaigne International Bank. That was before the economic downturn forced him out. Jeremy now worked for Marsh and Marsh Personal Investors down in TriBeCa. There he gave advice to small investors about how to keep their money from slipping through their fingers into the coffers of the Chinese and the banks, taxes and inflation. Jeremy didn’t like his job; didn’t like Bob Marsh or Fielding Marsh or the cramped offices among the warehouses, coffee shops, and hippie hangouts of the no-man’s-land between Greenwich Village and Wall Street.

  Jeremy was walking toward the West Side Highway, smoking a cigarette and trying to figure out how he could get back into the mainstream of corporate America. He tried to call his ex-girlfriend Mia. She’d stopped seeing him two weeks after he lost his position at AIB. There was interference on his cell phone and the call wouldn’t go through.

  Ronnie Bottoms was three paces behind Jeremy. As a rule, the mugger didn’t jump people in broad daylight but he was hungry and broke and mad about his mother. The street was empty at that moment and Ronnie made his move.

  Jeremy felt that there was someone behind him. He considered running. Why not run? he thought. People run all the time. They call it exercise. I could have just all of a sudden decided to exercise or maybe I remembered an appointment that I had to get to. I wouldn’t necessarily look like a fool if I just took off running.

  “No,” a voice in Jeremy’s head said.

  “No?” Jeremy thought this question, and then his consciousness was pushed aside. That’s how it felt to him. He was still there, still hearing and seeing the street, but he was no longer connected to his physical body. He couldn’t move or speak. His mind was somehow disconnected from his body, but his body still moved, seemingly of its own accord. It turned quickly and faced a brutish-looking black man who was half a step away with a hand raised in a very threatening manner.

  “Ronnie Bottoms,” Jeremy heard his voice say—no … command.

  “How you know my name?” the 280-some pounds of rage and hunger demanded.

  “You murdered a girl and pushed her under a stone,” Jeremy said with an unfamiliar personal confidence that was undergirded by a very familiar fear.

  “Fuck you, dude,” Ronnie said. His raised hand shook but the blow did not fall.

  “You must go back to her.”

  “Who the fuck are you, man?”

  “You must return,” Lorraine Fell said with Jeremy’s vocal cords.

  “You crazy.”

  Lorraine made Jeremy’s hands grab Ronnie by both wrists but was pushed down and kicked. She didn’t feel the pain but cried out in impotence when Ronnie ran from Jeremy’s trembling, defeated form. The onetime stockbroker regained some of the control of his body when he fell.

  Lorraine allowed her ethereal self to disengage and rise above the distasteful male vessel. Her wraith-self had no physical senses; in this form, she could not see or hear, taste or touch. But she could sense the sin-heavy bulk of hunger, Ronnie Bottoms, fleeing. She knew that the spiteful, self-centered lattice on the ground below her had already rejected the feeling that his mind and body had been possessed.

  Lorraine turned off her sense of frustration and presence, fading from the transitory moment and reappearing many hours later at what felt like a preordained rendezvous with her murderer.

  FOUR

  RONNIE BOTTOMS DIDN’T question his senses. But he wasn’t worried much about his perceptions. The stranger’s knowledge was crazy but that wouldn’t put food in his mouth.

  “It was just some kinda trick,” he said.

  “What?” an older Asian man asked.

  “Who the fuck’s talkin’ to you, Chink?” Ronnie said, not any angrier or hungrier than usual. He considered charging the old man a fine for bothering him. He’d just say, You owe me fi’e dollars for that, and if the man paid of his own accord, then it wouldn’t even be robbery, not really.

  The old man was from Vietnam. He had fought on the side of the French and then with the Americans against the Vietcong and Ho Chi Min. At that time, he believed in the war, but later he realized that every man, woman, and child in his country had been fighting different wars while thinking they moved as One against the Other.

  Lorraine was distracted by this chain of thoughts. She wondered for the first time if all people were not innocent on their own.

  Evil, she thought, can exist only if more than one person participates in it. Every torturer needs his victim. Every human deed needs a human object in order to be judged.

  But Lorraine turned away from these notions and took control of Ma Lin’s mind.

  “You must go back to her, Ronnie Bottoms,” she said with the aged warrior’s lips and tongue.

  “Who the fuck are you now, man?” Ronnie said loudly.

  People all around turned to see the origin of the vocalized rage and fear.

  “You must go back to her,” Ma Lin said. “I will come to you in a hundred bodies until you agree.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Come back with me to the place where you buried her and you will see.”

  “Why don’t you just get inside my head and make me?” Ronnie asked. He wasn’t a stupid man. He’d seen movies where people were taken over by aliens, devils, and mad scientists.

  “I don’t know why,” Lorraine admitted. “All I know is that you have to agree or I will tell the police that you murdered a young woman and left the body under that big rock.”

  “You don’t know that!” Ronnie exclaimed as three subway passengers made their way to another car.

  “I don’t need to know it,” Lorraine reasoned. “I just have to tell a policeman that I saw you do it, that and your name, Ronnie Bottoms.”

  Fear crawled between Ronnie’s scalp and skull. It felt like roaches racing around in the darkness of his mind.

  “Excuse me, sir,” a man said.

  Ronnie looked up and saw that it was a policeman. He was a big man with his hand on his pistol.

  “Yeah?” Ronnie asked.

  “Not you,” the policeman said.

  “Yes, Officer,” Ma Lin/Lorraine replied evenly, with raised eyebrows added for innocence.

  “Is this guy bothering you?” the white-skinned, blue-eyed policeman asked the old man while gazing at Ronnie.

  “No, sir, he is not. We were talking about a place in the park we used to go. He’s loud, my friend. Somebody might have thought that he was angry.”

  There was something wrong there; that’s what the policeman, Officer Stillman Tressman, thought.

  “You got any weapons on you?” Tressman asked Ronnie.

  “No, sir,” the prison-trained young man replied.

  Looking at Bottoms’s hands, the officer got another idea. “Would you like me to walk you somewhere, sir?” he asked Ma Lin. “Maybe to a different car.”

  “No, Officer. I’m perfectly happy sitting on this bench, talking to my friend Ronnie Bottoms.”

  Now the elderly Vietnamese became suspect in the eyes of the police officer. Young black thugs and old Asian men in baggy clothes did not sit together except by chance—or for trouble. Stillman Tressman looked from one to the other, trying to find a foothold, a toehold from which he could project his authority and therefore keep the peace.

  But there was nothing. The man who came from this car had said that there was a young man threatening an older gentleman. There they were, right in front of him, but there was no threat.

  “You just watch it, Bottoms,” the cop said.

  “Watch what?” Ronnie asked, wishing he hadn’t.

  “You gettin’ smart with me, man?” Tressman threatened.

  “No,” Ronnie said, looking down while raising his fingers, leaving the heels of his hands on his knees.

  The hand gesture reminded the paralyzed-but-still-conscious Ma Lin of the wings of an osprey rising up fro
m its body.

  “Okay, then,” Tressman asserted. He waited for a breath and a half before moving on to the opposite end of the subway car.

  “You see?” Lorraine said to Ronnie. “All I have to do is tell somebody about what you did and they will put you in jail forever.”

  * * *

  THE OLD MAN and the young one had to change trains from the uptown A to the downtown C.

  When they climbed out of the subway station, Lorraine decided to partially release her hold on the ex–military policeman. She got somewhat fatigued, keeping his will locked away from voluntary motion. At some point along the way, she realized that all she had to do was think about where she wanted him to go and he would do so without having to be completely dominated.

  “Where are we going?” Ma Lin asked Ronnie Bottoms when they entered the park.

  “I thought you knew?” the thug replied.

  “She does,” Ma said. “But now it is me talking.”

  Ronnie stopped and stared at the smaller man. “She?”

  “The spirit,” Ma said. “I was sitting there thinking about my lottery number and then she was in my mind, making me talk to you.”

  “You sure it’s a woman?” Ronnie asked.

  “Yes.”

  The two gazed at each other and then they were walking again.

  “It don’t matter where we goin’,” Ronnie said, and they were silent until they reached the big rocks that hid the jury-rigged tomb.

  With a gentle nudge in the old man’s mind, Lorraine was able to get him to climb with Ronnie up the side of the boulder and into the crevice. When Ma Lin began to get nervous, Lorraine dominated the older man’s mind again, temporarily blocking out his consciousness completely.… That was how she came upon the memory brought up by his fear:

  * * *

  IT WAS A long time ago, before Lorraine was born. It was hot and very humid in Saigon, but young Ma Lin wasn’t bothered by the heat. He was walking through a back alley doorway that was covered by a hanging cloth curtain. He had a pistol in his hand.

  The child was no more than fourteen, and small for her age at that; but in her eyes was experience well beyond adolescent years. She looked up at the military policeman, knowing what was going to happen next.

  Two American GIs had been assassinated by a child throwing a paper bag bomb into their open-topped jeep. U.S. Army Intelligence had identified the girl, and it was Ma Lin’s job to mete out justice.

  Her eyes widened just a bit. Lin held his pistol up and shot her in the forehead. In his mind at the time, he felt that he was doing her a favor. After all, she had no life, no future, and if he took her back to the Americans, they would have tortured her, justifying their actions by saying she was part of a secret Vietcong cabal. If he let her go, she’d just throw another bomb. This execution was the best possible answer for all concerned.

  There were many deaths like this in Ma Lin’s memory. They had lain there passively, like eggs in a carton, until he crawled into the space between the boulders and realized how perishable that child’s life was; how easily he could die without even the mildest concern in his killer’s heart.

  * * *

  UP FROM UNDER stone and earth, partially wrapped in Ronnie’s plastic sleeping tarp, they pulled the bloated, stinking corpse that had been Lorraine Fell. Of the three of them, Ma Lin was the only one used to the company of cadavers. His indifference to the fact of death somehow girded Lorraine’s spirit.

  “This man is going to leave now,” she said through the medium of her temporary slave. “When he is gone, put your hand on the body’s head.”

  “Why?” Ronnie wanted to know.

  “To undo what you’ve done.”

  “She’s dead,” he replied. “Very, very dead.”

  “And do you want to leave her like that?” Lorraine asked with Ma Lin’s mouth.

  Lorraine accompanied her captive up over the boulder and down to the tarmac path in Central Park. Then, she disappeared for a while, only to come back into existence when Ronnie put his palm against her dead body’s forehead.

  * * *

  IN HER ABSENCE, Ronnie lost his appetites—all of them. Maybe it was the smell of the corpse, but he didn’t think so. The dead girl’s gray face was sad and slack and he felt sorry that he’d killed her; not guilty, not yet. He felt remorse for the dead girl through the emotions he had for his mother. He wished that someone would take him to his mother’s grave and say that he could bring her back by touching her head.

  He wished they would.

  FIVE

  RONNIE FELT AN oily, slithering shock travel up his arm like a living thing burrowing under the skin. It was a frightening sensation but at the same time so powerful that he bowed his head as his mother used to make him do in church when the minister was saying the prayer.

  He could see Lorraine clearly but not the space she was in. He was sorry that he killed her. He wanted to say that he’d only done it because she was screaming, but this seemed to him like a poor excuse.

  “How are you doin’ this?” he asked.

  “The Silver Box,” Lorraine said.

  “Huh?”

  “I need you to resurrect me, Ronnie.”

  “Like Jesus?”

  “No,” she said, “like a man making up for his mistake, like Ma Lin will never be able to do for all those poor people he killed.”

  “The chink?”

  “He is from Vietnam,” Lorraine said. “He was a soldier who murdered his own people because he thought it was his duty.”

  Ronnie felt the truth of her words without images or specific details. He knew that the little old man had crossed the same lines he had. This made him think that he wasn’t alone.

  “You had no right to do to me what you did,” Lorraine said. “I didn’t do anything to you. You had no right.”

  “No,” Ronnie said.

  “No?” the spirit screamed.

  “I did not have the right to take your life.”

  “Give it back to me.” Lorraine’s words echoed in his mind.

  Ronnie closed his eyes and then opened them again. He found himself alone on his knees with his left hand on the stinking corpse head. On the ground next to the body lay a white stone about the size of a softball. He gripped the stone with his right hand and …

  * * *

  THE STINGING, OILY, writhing feeling that had been traveling up his left arm changed directions. Instead of flowing into him, it was tugging at his insides, wanting him to give in and release.

  “You killed me,” Lorraine said. She was standing somewhere out of sight.

  “So what you want?”

  “Life.”

  The word set off a series of connections in Ronnie’s mind. He saw himself raging and lashing out with a dispassionate eye. He didn’t understand why the man he was had been so angry and violent and just plain mad.

  The metaphysical snake pulled at his arm like a playful dog wanting the ball to be thrown.

  Ronnie saw his mother sitting in her chair in front of the TV. Her low-cut blouse revealed the tattoo of the name Missy on the upper part of her left breast. Grandmama Missy, his mother’s mother.

  Ronnie’s mind’s eye settled on that word tattooed over a red heart on dark brown skin. He would place his cheek next to there and listen to the deep pounding of Big Mama’s real heart. She would put her hand on his side and hum some song she’d forgotten the words to. And he was so happy.…

  The snake that was devouring and pulling on his arm was blind and writhing. The motion of its body was both language spoken and language heard.

  Listening to Big Mama’s heart; that was life. And it was so beautiful and wonderful and safe that Ronnie would dream of that beat all through the night. If he woke up without her there, he would scream until she came and gathered him into the deep drumbeat of her embrace.

  Then, from a place in the pit of his gut, Ronnie Bottoms felt the surge of passion, love, and freedom. It was like the magma flow of volcanoes
that Miss Peters talked about in third grade science. The hot surging energy rose up through his chest past the left shoulder and down his arm into the incorporeal snake’s maw. Ronnie’s right hand gripped the white stone and it hummed in response. His bones vibrated as the whole history of his rage and anger turned miraculously into the humming love of his mother and the desire of the woman he’d killed.

  It was like an orgasm that wouldn’t stop, an outpouring of love and rage and power and, and, and with God holding his shoulders so that he didn’t spiral off that perfect pussy pushing up against his unrelenting thrust.

  At some point Ronnie realized that he was dying, that a man cannot come so long and hard without giving up his life. But he didn’t care about dying, because Lorraine had come into view like a green island after many years on the open sea. She was vast and beautiful and full of strange music that blared and insinuated, sang and laughed.

  He felt his bones cracking and theoretical venom flowing into his veins. He squeezed that rock so hard that he thought his fingers might break. He opened his eyes and saw an endless plane of scarlet. Lorraine was singing crazily somewhere to his left while the stone purred like a sleepy tiger to the right.

  The last thing Ronnie thought before losing consciousness was that he might get ripped apart between the python and tiger. Instead of fear, this notion called up the anticipation of ecstasy. If he were torn open, his essence could work its way back toward all the drifting souls in the universe, into outer space that really, he realized, was not empty at all.

  * * *

  THE SILVER BOX was enthralled with the passage of energy between Ronnie and the murdered woman. Lorraine Fell’s extracted and reconstituted consciousness hollered while the young man poured out his matter and his soul for her. The sympathy, the music between them was a perfect counterweight to the ignorance and hatred that formed these two frail entities. So much power was released that the Box had to erect a barrier between them and the rest of the park.

  The understanding occurring, there under the pebble moon, in an almost forgotten corner of the universe, was a synchronicity so complex that Silver Box would have had to snuff out an entire galaxy to generate enough power to equal it. The divine machine’s perception units turned one after the other toward this deific phenomenon. So intent was Silver Box on Ronnie and Lorraine that for an infinitesimal fraction of a nanosecond, it forgot all else.