Inside a Silver Box

by Walter Mosley

  “What does it feel like?” she asked, “when you came in contact with it?”

  “It’s like when a mouse dies somewhere in the house,” Ronnie said. “You could smell it, but you don’t know where the stink is comin’ from. But you know you smellin’ it still and all. That’s the way I know that Nontee’ll come after us, but if we’re lucky, it’s gonna take him a while—and if he’s not sure where I am, maybe we could catch him off guard.”

  “It’s like your arm is the cheese in a mousetrap,” Lorraine speculated.

  “Or a real smart mouse playin’ dead in a mantrap.”

  “That’s very dangerous.”

  “Somebody got to save the world. You know for damn sure it ain’t gonna save itself.”

  Again Lorraine laughed.

  * * *

  LE GRAND CHAMBRE was a French café half a floor below street level on East Eighty-first Street. It was a restaurant often patronized by Lorriane’s father, and so, even without a reservation, the maître d’ set up a special booth for the two couples in a usually cordoned-off corner of the dining room.

  “How long will the kitchen be open, François?” Lorraine asked their waiter.

  “Until your dessert, mademoiselle.”

  Ronnie enjoyed the opulence but was slightly distracted by the faraway pain in his forearm and Freya’s thigh pressed up against him on the padded bench.

  “How was your day?” Lorraine asked Freya.

  “What?” the young teacher’s assistant asked, honestly confused by the rich white girl.

  “At work,” Lorraine coaxed.

  “Oh … mmm … this one little girl named Seela had head lice, and the other kids were makin’ fun so I took her to the nurse’s office and worked on her hair with a fine metal comb an’ talked to her. It was nice that they let me have the time to do that, ’cause you know a child will remember kindness more than a whippin’.”

  “Do you plan to be a teacher one day?” Alton asked even though Lorraine was squeezing his erection under the table.

  “When I finish at college,” Freya said. “What about you, Ronnie?”

  “What about me?”

  “Are you gonna go back to school?”

  “I’d’a had to have been there in the first place to go back,” he said. “And you know I only ever learned anything at all in Miss Peters’s second-grade class.”

  “That was her kindness,” Freya said with emphasis.

  “Yeah,” Ronnie agreed. “She was nice to me and I never forgot it. Sometimes when I was in prison, I’d sit in my cell at night and repeat everything I could remember from her lessons—almost word for word.”

  “You were in prison?” Alton Brown asked. He felt odd sitting at that booth with people he hardly knew, having this strange sensual woman slowly massaging his sex.

  “Uh-huh. A couple’a times.”

  “What for?”

  “Armed robbery and assault.”

  “Oh.”

  Lorraine turned to her date because his penis had gone limp under her hand.

  “Don’t worry, brother,” Ronnie assured. “I’m not like that no more. I don’t fight unless I have to, and I don’t need to steal, ’cause I got a minimum wage job and Lore let me stay with her.”

  “It’s, it’s just that I never knew anybody who had been to prison,” Alton said. “What was it like?”

  “It’s a mothafuckah, man. I mean it’s tough up in there. People gettin’ slashed and raped, robbed and beat up ev’ry day. There’s more drugs than on the street in East New York. And you know you got to get strong in your body an’ your mind if you wanna even hope to survive. It’s like the whole world is evil, like hell. And here you cain’t even blame nobody ’cause you the one got yourself convicted. But that’s all ovah now. You don’t even have to worry about me.”

  The quartet talked like that, back and forth, touching each other and sharing pedestrian hopes and dreams with a few nightmares added by Ronnie.

  Ronnie almost forgot about the Silver Box and Nontee, Ma Lin and UTB-Claude. The only reason he thought about them at all was the beacon of pain that he was farming in his arm.

  Lorraine, however, was thinking primarily about the Silver Box and the world she and her opposite twin had set out to save. Her six circuits around Manhattan had planted the seed of a thought about the nature of the struggle between her mechanical savior and its biological enemy. That same struggle, she felt, was everywhere in existence; it was in the children’s evolving eyes and in the undulating currents beneath the surface of the sentient rivers, it was in the buildings that struggled against gravity and the pull of matter that was unconscious and uneven but still constant the way ocean waves are constant.

  Lorraine leaned over to Alton and whispered, “Come on outside with me a minute.”

  The couple got up, promising to be back in a few minutes.

  When they got out in the night air, Lorraine said, “I need you to come back to my place and talk to me until morning.”

  “That’s all?”

  “If we fuck, we’ll just fall asleep after,” she said. “I don’t want to fall asleep, because I can’t bother Ronnie. Not tonight.”

  “So you just want to sit up all night and talk?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know when we have sex, it’s not like some physical thing,” he said. “I mean it feels great, but I don’t think it’s just fucking.”

  “There’s nothing without being physical,” she said, “without feeling close because of that. I mean, when people say that something is more than physical, it’s like they’re trying to get away from what they are. And what they are is so deep that it hurts. I love taking you in my room. You love it too, but tonight I need to stay awake, so you have to talk to me.”

  “But why all night? I mean that does it have something to do with love?”

  “It’s more a kind of commitment. Will you do it for me?”

  “I guess I could try.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “HOW DID YOU meet Ronnie?” Alton Brown asked Lorraine Fell in her bedroom later that night. They were fully dressed except for their shoes, reclining on pillows and bunched-up blankets on her bigger-than-king-size bed.

  The sliding glass doors that led to the balcony outside were open, allowing little breezes in that wafted through flimsy curtains and over them now and again.

  “He attacked me,” she said. “I guess you could hardly call that a meeting, but it was the first time we were physically aware of each other.”

  “He tried to rob you?”

  “And rape me and beat me too,” she said in a bland, distracted tone.

  She was thinking about how different her perspective on life had become; how she’d learned to tell the truth through telling stories that were near enough to actual events; like UTB-Claude Festerling was close to being a man who’d once lived.

  Everything she said about Ronnie was true, but there was so much more. And even though there was more, this was enough to tell the tale.

  “And you’re still friends with him?” Alton asked.

  “After a while he realized that he was wrong,” she said. “And I came to understand that even though there is no God, that there is.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That the history of religion is more like a story between cousins or peoples than it is the study of the master and the slave.”

  “Hegel,” Alton said.

  “I used to study him, but now I know that not only am I a part of God, I am also equal to God.”

  “I’m not even religious, but that still sounds like blasphemy to me.”

  Lorraine smiled and kissed the awkward young man’s cheek. “What about you, baby?” she said. “What’s going on in your head?”

  The question seemed to throw Alton off. He leaned away from Lorraine.

  “What?” she said.

  “I don’t know how to say it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Didn’t Ronnie tell
you?”

  “He hasn’t said one word about you. Why would he?”

  “I don’t know. It just seems like you guys are so close that you’d talk about everything.”

  “Everything is a matter of perception.”

  “Do you always talk like that?” Alton asked.

  “It used to be that this was the way I thought and wrote papers. Somehow I couldn’t talk about what I thought, and therefore I couldn’t really feel how I felt, if you know what I mean.”

  “So you feel that I’m not a part of everything?” Alton looked crestfallen.

  “Not the everything that Ronnie and I talk about. But here tonight you are definitely in my constellation.”

  “You’re a strange woman.”

  “I’ll make love to you at sunrise because you called me a woman and not a girl.”

  Alton smiled at that, both amused and expectant.

  “What didn’t Ronnie tell me?” Lorraine asked, and Alton’s smile flitted away like a carp, she thought, running from a shadow crossing over the surface of its pond.

  “I have a longtime girlfriend,” he said.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Christine.”

  “That’s a lovely name.”

  “Aren’t you mad?”

  “Why would I be?”

  “Because we got together and I lied by omission.”

  “Christine isn’t part of my everything.”

  “You don’t love me?”

  The question seemed essential, a product of hunger. She imagined a cat her brother had once owned called Whitey. Whitey would mewl around his bed when it was hungry or lonely.

  The memory of Whitey made Lorraine aware of a crying sound that no one else could hear. It was Nontee careering through the stratosphere, crying like that old cat—enraged, starving, and alone.

  “Lorraine?”

  “Yes, Alton?”

  “Do you want me to go?”

  “Why would I want that?”

  “Because I lied.”

  “Is you sitting here talking to me when you want to be fucking a lie?”

  “Not really.”

  “I have nightmares, Mr. Brown. They’re terrible, and only if I lie down next to Ronnie do they go away. But if I do that tonight, they’ll get worse. I need you to stay here with me to keep my mind active. That’s more than love, and it doesn’t have anything to do with your girlfriend.”

  “I don’t really understand any of this.”

  “Does that matter?”

  * * *

  “IS SHE GONNA come runnin’ out here screamin’ any minute?” Freya asked Ronnie.

  They were sitting on the sofa, facing the windows, her leaning against his chest with his arm around her shoulders.

  “I don’t think so,” Ronnie said.

  “But you say she do it almost every night.”

  “There’s somethin’ going on.”

  “You mean her and Alton?”

  “No. She’s, she’s planning something, but she doesn’t want me to know what it is. She doesn’t want me messed up in it.”

  “You mean like some kinda crime?”

  “My arm hurts,” Ronnie said, holding out his left forearm for her to see.

  “Looks like a bruise under the skin,” she said.

  “It’s an infection.”

  “You should see a doctor, then.”

  “I wanna feel it for a while first.”

  “Why?”

  “You know there was only two people I evah learned anything from,” he said like that shadow over a carp in Lorraine’s mind, avoiding Freya’s question almost playfully. “The first was Miss Peters, and the second was Old Bristow up in Attica.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Old Bristow was doin’ three life sentences for killin’ his wife and his wife’s boyfriend.”

  “That’s only two murders.”

  “His wife was pregnant with her boyfriend’s child.”

  “Oh.”

  “He didn’t remember doin’ it, but the crime was so bloody and his girlfriend was white, her boyfriend too, and Bristow was black as tar. But old Bristow wasn’t bitter about it, because he felt bad about what he did.”

  “He found religion?”

  “Naw. He just knew that killin’ two people for bein’ in love was wrong. I don’t even think that Bristow knew who I was, but I used to sit around an’ listen to him ’cause that motherfucker knew some shit.”

  “Like what?” Freya kissed Ronnie’s cheek.

  “Like one time, this dude Trevor was sayin’ that America’s war on drugs was worse than the drugs themselves. And Bristow said that the original war on drugs was the ancient Roman army.”

  “He told you that the Romans had a war on drugs too?” Freya asked.

  “That’s what I thought he meant,” Ronnie said excitedly, like a child. “But, but, but he said that before every big battle that the centurions, that’s like a captain, gave every soldier some opium.”

  “What for?”

  “They’d eat it and then they didn’t feel pain or fear.”

  “But how could they fight if they were high?”

  “Fightin’ for them was like a reflex. They fought and fought and wasn’t afraid’a nuthin’. That’s what Bristow called a real war on drugs.”

  “You so crazy, Ronnie Bottoms.”

  “Crazy ’bout you, girl. You know I been thinkin’ ’bout you ever since that night you made me buy you that Italian sub and celery soda.”

  “You gonna get all crazy with me tonight?”

  “Not with my arm like this. I think if my blood beats too hard, it’ll get bad.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?” she asked with a hint of a smile behind the words.

  Ronnie hugged her close and wondered what his soul mate in the other room was planning.

  Freya allowed herself to be folded into the embrace, feeling oddly wonderful and definitely strange. For the first time since she was a little girl, she thought about having babies.

  “Do you want to have children, Ronnie?”

  His first thought was about the double rebirth of him and Lorraine in the secret place between the boulders in Central Park. This memory contained equal parts pain and ecstasy, miracle and something akin to death.

  But these thoughts were too big for Freya’s tender question. She was hugging his neck and wanting him the way he’d once wanted. There was something transformational (though that wasn’t the word in his mind) that her small query brought about in his heart; a new road like that interminable path traveled by him and Lorraine on the journey between the Silver Box and their return to Central Park.

  “Ronnie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you?”

  “Want to have children?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “One day.”

  “When you find the right girl?”

  “I got the right girl right here.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  ALTON BROWN FELL asleep before the sun came up and therefore forfeited his chance at an early morning romp. Lorraine, dressed in only a pink T-shirt and a tight-fitting pair of purple jeans, went barefoot out onto Fifth Avenue at 5:37 that morning. Ronnie and Freya were asleep in each other’s arms when she left the condo.

  “Ralph,” she said to the doorman as she was leaving.

  “Yes, Miss Fell?”

  “Tell Maintenance that I want my study made into a bedroom as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, Miss Fell.”

  * * *

  THE SPRINT ACROSS Central Park elated the ex-coed. People noticed her fleet movement but did not believe the speed at which she moved. She didn’t care what anyone else thought. All that mattered was the Plan; hatched separately between her and Ronnie Bottoms.

  Lorraine no longer questioned the miraculous events of her life and so was not surprised that the space between the boulders had now achieved the dimensions of a wide valley somewhere on an Earth that was not cultivated by
human neuroses and enterprise.

  The stone table stood at the bottom of the hillside boulder she descended. UTB-Claude stood there along with Ma Lin. A large, red-eyed, jade green bird stood upon the military cop’s right shoulder. Lorraine recognized the fowl as the creature that had harried Ronnie when he was paralyzed on their journey back.

  “Where is Mr. Bottoms?” Ma Lin asked.

  “Asleep.”

  “We need you both to track down Nontee.”

  “I have to confer with the Silver Box,” she said.

  “We represent that entity.”

  “But you are not him or them or whatever you call it,” Lorraine said. “You are mere simulacra allowed to have and limited by free thought, and therefore your words are imperfect interpretations of your creator’s terms.”

  “He created you,” UTB-Claude offered.

  “Ronnie Bottoms used Silver Box’s tools to re-create me.”

  “Go get Ronnie,” Ma Lin ordered.

  “I killed you once,” she replied. “I could do it again.”

  At these words, the life seemed to go out of her inquisitors’ eyes. They stood motionless, reminding the young woman of a black-and-white freeze-frame shot in the backdrop of an avant-garde film of the early twentieth century. From the distance she noticed a motion. It was a long-bodied, slender-limbed thing. And it was big, considering how far away it must have been. The creature’s movements were both jerky and elegant, something not mammalian, maybe not earthly.

  After three or four minutes it came near.

  Its skin was shining silver with eyes of liquid gold. The long tapered head had either hair or complex antennae flowing back along the beautiful form, and it walked upon a dozen delicate, multi-jointed silver legs that curved forward upon hooked claws that dug into the ground as it propelled itself along.

  The alien creature stopped three or four feet away from Lorraine, its metallic liquid eyes distorting the images it reflected in a continual swirl of motion that stopped now and again, as if taking little snapshots of its surroundings.

  Ma Lin and UTB-Claude were gone, but the green parrot had remained. It was now standing on the table, tilting its head to keep Lorraine in its line of sight.

  The long insectlike creature’s head also swiveled, allowing its eyes to make different distorted reflections of Lorraine.