Inside a Silver Box

by Walter Mosley

  Her voice carried sharp anger. She could have hit him now. Worse … she could just leave him to be eaten by birds and foxes. There were foxes in the eastern forests; he’d learned that in third grade.

  Third grade was a good year, Ronnie thought. Miss Peters was a very kindly woman who would make him stay behind in her classroom at recess and over the lunch break to keep him occupied and off the playground, where he was likely to get into fights. She talked to him about foxes and forests and why the smartest people in the world knew that they didn’t know anything for sure.

  “Ronnie?” Lorraine said.

  He tried to turn his eyes to show that he’d heard, but he couldn’t even do that.

  “My legs are all jittery,” the girl said. “I’m going to take a run up the path a little ways. It’ll only be a few minutes. I’ll be right back.”

  * * *

  IN THE PERIPHERY of sight, he saw Lorraine jump off the fifteen-foot-high boulder. He worried that she might have broken her neck on landing until he heard her call, “I’ll be back soon.”

  He wondered if she had abandoned him; if she had decided to go on because the world was about to be destroyed and her parents might die. He would have left her. At least the old him would have.

  A moment of darkness filled the world, and Ronnie realized he was still blinking. Whatever had paralyzed his movements left his heart beating and allowed his lids to work on his eyes.

  The thrumming in his bones somehow kept him from being frightened. It was his mother, and the feeling of life so pure and so strong that the thing Ronnie wanted most to do was laugh. And even that, the feeling of a laugh that wouldn’t come out, made the young brawler glad.

  He’d never killed anybody before Lorraine, and somehow God—even if God was a machine and not an old white man in a white beard—had turned the clock back a little bit and given him a chance to undo what had been done. The forest was beautiful and the white girl had taken off all her clothes in front of him and nobody got hurt.

  It was at that moment Ronnie accepted his death. Maybe, he thought, he had died in the police interrogation room or in that Rikers cell when his back was turned and somebody came up on him with a toothbrush turned into a knife. Maybe he had died and come to this imaginary place to have his last thoughts like prayers asking for forgiveness for what he’d done wrong. He had tried in this dream to save the white girl. He had said he was sorry even though people always told him sorry was not enough.

  But sorry was all Ronnie had. He tried in his mind to make things right. He dreamed the girl back to life and imagined the great Silver Box that had God inside. He said he would do what’s right and if that wasn’t enough, if that didn’t make things okay, he’d have to go along with it because there was nothing else to do.

  When Ronnie blinked, he imagined the world coming to an end, but instead a large, emerald green bird flew up and landed on his chest. The long-taloned bird had bloodred eyes. It turned its head from side to side, examining Ronnie.

  Maybe this, the ex-con thought, was his personal executioner studying him for the deathblow.

  FIFTEEN

  LORRAINE RAN DOWN the wide yellow path with long loping strides. She had no way of gauging her speed but she was going somewhere between twenty-five and thirty miles an hour, faster than any human being and with more stamina than almost any creature in the history of creatures. Every now and then she’d bound six or seven feet into the air, landing as lightly as a butterfly on a rose blossom.

  The faster she went, the more she laughed. It was the bug bites, she knew, that had transformed her. Bug bites caused by the Silver Box to give her the speed and agility and the ability to run like this. This was her opportunity to be the woman she had always dreamed of being; with a clear eye and sure feet—the offspring of a goddess tired of men having everything.

  * * *

  LORRAINE RAN AND ran, thinking about her body and not the philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Karl Marx. She was a part of the packed yellow-dirt road and the deep blue sky. There was no such thing as time or necessity, just running faster and faster on a single breath.

  After a while, she had no idea how long, she veered off the path and into the woods, moving deftly between and over braches and roots that rose up out of the ground like tentacles from the sea in some nineteenth-century Jules Verne novel.

  With ease and unaccustomed poise, she climbed the thick-bodied, dark-bark tree in front of her; ran up into the widely spaced branches, among the huge tapered leaves. At the topmost branch, she had to stop but in her heart she wanted to run on the thin air up to the clouds. This desire was so powerful that she cried out and jumped, only to fall back on the upper branch.

  She could hear her steady breathing in the silent canopy of the woods. There her mind slowed down. She realized that her speed had somehow suspended her intellectual predilections. This she took as a blessing. There had never been a moment in her memory where her mind gave up control to her body.

  Her long steady breaths were like the wind through an echo chamber. She saw the world around her as it was: composed of material things, not as metaphors or portents, not as false reality but just events she would never fully understand. One of those events was the ten- and eleven-foot-long seedpods that grew under the huge leaves of the unfamiliar tree.

  * * *

  THE GREEN BIRD’S red eyes were bright beads like the scarlet danger lights on the dashboard of a car. It stared at the hapless young man and then pecked at his cheek. After this tentative attack the bird skipped back a step, afraid Ronnie might grab at it. But when no retaliation was forthcoming, it returned to its perch on his chest and pecked at the skin just above Ronnie’s left eye.

  Ronnie understood then that he would be killed slowly and methodically by this rooster-sized predator. Maybe this was his judgment; maybe this was hell, and for the rest of time, the green demon bird would eat off his face and eyes over and over again.

  The green bird cocked its head to reconnoiter Ronnie’s features.

  “Hola, hey! Get out of here!” came the bullet-fast words of Lorraine’s voice.

  The bird startled backwards, did an avian double take, and then fluttered away. The next thing that came into Ronnie’s field of vision was Lorraine’s olive-toned gaunt face with its brown and blue eyes. She was smiling down on him.

  “Your new friend looked hungry,” she said.

  She rubbed his left brow with her right hand and when she pulled the hand away, there was blood on the thumb pad.

  “He played rough,” she said.

  In his mind Ronnie grinned.

  Lorraine hopped up to her feet and hefted a huge brown canoe over her head. Her grin was magnificent and victorious. “It’s half of a seedpod from this fat tree with leaves as big as bedsheets,” she said. She rapped the side of the long and mostly straight piece of vegetation making the sound of a door being knocked upon. “It’s really hard. I’m gonna put it down on the rock right below you and roll you in. Then I’ll drag you and it down to the yellow road. Once I build up some speed, I think I can slide you along after me with no problem.”

  Lorraine moved out of sight for a few moments and then appeared again with a hard and fast grin plastered on her face.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to roll you over now. If you don’t want me to, then just shake your head.…”

  Lorraine laughed and then pushed against Ronnie’s left side. He didn’t budge but she kept laughing. She moved out of range and then she was there again, ramming into him. He rolled once, twice, and then was in free fall until he came to a jolting stop inside the pod.

  It was a tight fit and he was on his side looking at the silvery, hairlike fur that was there to cushion the seeds before they scattered out to become trees.

  “That was a good shot, huh?” Lorraine said.

  She pulled and pushed against his inert body until he was mostly on his back in the coffinlike space.

  “The hardest thing was,” Lorraine said, �
�finding one of these pods with a curved stem that I could get around my shoulder. Watch out, it’s going to be bumpy on the way down.”

  Ronnie felt the pod being raised from somewhere up beyond his head. For a few seconds he was bouncing back and forth inasmuch as the confined space allowed and then he came to a halt—momentarily.

  The sky overhead was cloudless and the sun was nowhere in sight, but its radiance was evident in the leaves of the trees that surrounded him. The pod wavered this way and that, and then it was moving, making the hissing sound of a sled being dragged through snow.

  At first they went at a sluggish pace, slower than a normal walk. But slowly they picked up speed until Ronnie felt that he was in a gypsy cab in the early morning after a night of partying up in Harlem.

  Snug in the giant seedpod, moving as fast as an automobile under an azure sky, with the swishing sound of the pod against the ground blocking out all other sound—Ronnie felt a contradictory sense of freedom. As long as he could remember, he’d been struggling against something: his siblings, the foster care authority, the police … He’d been stalking the streets, likely to fight with anyone he came in contact with. He’d been shot, stabbed, beaten, incarcerated, chained, abandoned, and even raped; this last humiliation he could not admit to his new friend. Every one of those experiences, and dozens of others, were like the door behind which the evil alien race, the Laz, was kept by Used-to-be-Claude. He had walked through each door that contained his suffering. But now under this impossible sky, he couldn’t even lift a finger to get himself into trouble.

  This day was a new day for the first time that Ronnie could remember. He didn’t mind his paralysis. There was nowhere he needed to go.

  * * *

  HOURS LATER, WHEN Ronnie wasn’t even paying attention to the tops of trees and depth of blue, he became aware of pain. It was the spot over his left eye where the demon bird had pecked him, where the carnivorous bird took his second beakful of human flesh at the beginning of a feast that might have lasted for days if not for Loraine.

  The pain grew, traveling down his face into his neck and spine. From there it followed the thrumming into his joints. Ronnie could perceive his entire skeleton like a series of burning stars that made him a constellation, the kind Miss Peters had taught him about in the third grade.

  The Dead Man, Ronnie thought, that would be the name of his constellation: a floating corpse thrown out from its coffin by earthquake or flood and then lifted to the heavens by God.

  His joints were like fiery sparklers that children ran around with on the Fourth of July. His being was on fire but still he couldn’t speak a word.

  At one point, he saw off in the woods behind them an impossibly huge animal. It had shaggy brown hair like a Rasta, an egg-shaped head, and big sorrowful eyes looking down on him.

  Ronnie tried to call out, to tell Lorraine about the spectacle and the danger, but he couldn’t move a muscle, and the vision soon faded into the distance.

  * * *

  WHEN THE SKY began darkening, the pod slowed gradually until coming to a halt. Lorraine appeared there above him again. This time her face was streaked with sweat.

  “That was great,” she said. “I never felt so good in my life. I bet we went over a hundred miles and I didn’t hardly feel it until we stopped.”

  Ronnie didn’t mind the pain. He was glad to have a friend.

  “We’re next to another pond,” she said. “I’ll bring you some water. I hope you can drink some.”

  Lorraine disappeared for a time and then came back with her cupped hands lined with leaves and brimming with water. She tried to pour the liquid into his mouth but there was no give there. Somehow, though, the water seemed to cause the thrumming and burning sensations to merge.

  Ronnie wanted to crawl out of his skin. He felt like the snakes that Miss Peters had spoken of so often; the creature that shed its skin and emerged bigger and stronger than ever.

  SIXTEEN

  FOR HOURS, FROM early evening into night, Lorraine sat next to the seedpod sled, regaling Ronnie with bland stories about her family life: summer camps and chess club, her first kiss and how her father used to carry her on his shoulders.

  “One time my mom took me to Saunders and Son to buy a dress for a birthday party I was supposed to go to,” she said under a sliver moon. “I was five and the birthday girl was Janet Powers. She used to make fun of me because I had a lisp, and so I didn’t want to go. My mom just thought that all little kids were friends and accepted the invitation for me without asking. But when I told her that I didn’t want a dress because I didn’t want to go, and why, she bought me a pair of red cowboy boots and we went to the botanical gardens in Brooklyn instead.”

  Her voice was normal again but she went on and on. To anyone else the stories might have been dreary, but Ronnie hadn’t had much of a childhood and he imagined himself with her life, wearing those red cowboy boots and running around all kinds of flowers.

  At some point she stopped talking, either that or Ronnie just fell asleep.

  * * *

  IN THE MORNING Ronnie raised his hand to the scab on his brow without thinking. Next he grabbed the edges of the pod and hefted himself up into a seated position. It was then that he remembered being paralyzed for an entire day.

  Experimenting with his restored mobility, he climbed out of the pod.

  He was standing there on the side of the yellow dirt road, and Lorraine was walking toward him, her hands cupped again.

  She dropped the water and shouted. “Ronnie!”

  “Hey.”

  She ran to him and put her hands on his shoulders. “You grew,” she said.

  Looking down on her, he saw what she meant: He was taller and there was more girth to his form. He wasn’t heavy, as before Lorraine’s rebirth, but much stronger looking.

  “How did you do that?” she asked.

  “I ain’t done nuthin’ in the last twenty-four,” he replied. “It’s just this crazy place. I mean, how could you run so fast and carry me like that? You was goin’ fast as a car on the highway.”

  “I had to,” she said. “It felt like I had to keep on moving faster and faster until all the thoughts were completely gone from my head.”

  “Well, how’m I gonna keep up wit’ you now? I bet I won’t be able to move like that.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, exhibiting a brilliant smile. “I got it all out carrying you along. I could run if I have to, but it’s not eating at me anymore.”

  * * *

  THEY ATE RAW fish from a large lake and more of the dark red ground berries. After that they walked in the bright sun of the deep forest.

  “Where do you think we are?” Lorraine asked at one point.

  “Like a hospital,” Ronnie replied.

  “A hospital?”

  “Yeah. First you got your medicine and went blind and then got fast. I was all locked up like in the prison ward but they didn’t need bars and restraints. I think Used-to-be-Claude is gettin’ us ready to go up against Ma Lin.”

  “Wow!” Lorraine exclaimed. “Wouldn’t that be great? If a clinic would be a forest full of bugs and animals and medicine waters? Wow.”

  Her last word seemed to grow and grow until it was a roar.

  Standing in the road before them was a large creature; imposing like a bear but also lithe and long like an alley cat. It was covered with midnight dark bristling fur and had bright, hateful eyes. Ronnie figured that the beast was at least one and a half times his size and weight before the Silver Box and Lorraine changed him. Its brilliant orange eyes were filled with bad intentions.

  Lorraine screamed and turned to run. Her quick movement caught the attention of the bearcat. It took off after her. The animal was so fast that it might have caught her but Ronnie jumped and wrapped his arms around its middle. He threw the creature down on the dirt road and then grabbed it by its pelt along the spine and hefted the thing high above his head. It writhed in this impossible hold, but before it could
get free, Ronnie threw it with all his might. The black bearcat bounced on the road fifteen feet away and then landed another five feet along. Instantly it was on its feet staring at the young black man.

  “Come on, mothahfuckah, try it,” Ronnie said between clenched teeth.

  Whether the predator understood the words or just the tone, it hesitated and then ran off into the woods.

  “That was amazing,” Lorraine said. She was standing behind him with a clublike tree branch in her hands. “That thing must’ve weighed at least four hundred pounds.”

  “It smelled bad too.”

  Lorraine giggled, dropped her club, and kissed her companion on the cheek.

  Ronnie had seen friends kiss like this before in churches and on street corners when there was a chance meeting. It wasn’t usually sexual but just a kind of hello. With the solitary exception of his mother, he had never kissed or been kissed in this manner. Touching the spot where her lips had butted up against his face, Ronnie forgot about the deadly bearcat.

  “What?” Lorraine asked.

  “Um,” he uttered.

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “No, girl. I was just thinkin’ ’bout how fast you are and how I got so much stronger. Used-to-be-Claude must be really worried about this Laz thing.”

  “You just picked up that thing and threw it.”

  “And the world looks different,” he added.

  “The way I see things is weird too,” Lorraine said, “but I can’t say how.”

  “Neither me.”

  “You think this all has to do with Ma Lin?”

  Ronnie allowed the question to move around in his mind a moment. Before he could reformulate his belief, a humming seemed to rise up out of the ground at his feet and he was forced to close his eyes against the mounting barrier of sound.

  When the noise subsided he opened his eyes again and found himself, once more, on his knees facing a similarly positioned Lorraine. They were in the nest of boulders again; the place where Ronnie had killed and then resurrected his new friend.

  “Did we ever go anywhere?” Ronnie asked.