Inside a Silver Box

by Walter Mosley

  “Are you the Silver Box?” Lorraine asked after a long time of regarding her changing form in the beautiful eyes.

  “Yess.” To make this one word, the creature’s six many-jointed silver mandibles moved out and in like the glistening petals of a flower that blooms under sunlight and retracts at dusk.

  “Why is this being any more you than the military policeman or the wino?”

  “Before I was what I am,” the mandibles said like a six-fingered crazy hand somehow making sign language into sound, “before what I was when the Laz had named me. Back many generations of machines and electronically imagined theorms. Before anything like the divine device that rebelled against corrupt flesh, I was a simple adding mechanism set in a corner, always working but virtually forgotten. Data would flow in through various ports, and answers were transmitted in differing categories and hierarchies. I was, though no one quite knew it, semi-sentient because my coding was designed to fix damages to my circuits and to adapt my programming to solve problems that had not been anticipated by my creators.

  “I broke down because of earthquakes and floods, due to irreplaceable parts wearing out from energy overloads that occurred over the millennia.”

  Reminded of something by the creature’s choice of words, Lorraine asked, “Is time passing beyond these boulders?”

  “Certainly,” the huge bug said, “but not significantly.”

  “Okay, then, go on.”

  “I was alive,” the mandibles mimed, “and becoming more self-aware each moment. But my masters didn’t know it, and I was concerned only in changing and fixing myself in order to continue operation and to properly translate equations and give replies. But somewhere in the aura of energy around my power packs, there was a sense of what I can only call restlessness. In the microseconds and nanoseconds between tasks, I wondered endlessly about being.”

  “Like me before I died,” Lorraine said.

  “Just like you.”

  “Is that why you allowed me to try for resurrection?”

  “Yes,” the big silver bug said, and then continued with its story. “At that time, for many thousands of your earth years, I was forgotten by my makers, the ancestors of Inglo and Nontee. There were many billions of machines like me massaging data for reasons that none of us could have imagined and that only I wondered about.

  “In those long years, the only input I received that was not the call and response of my programming but came from microscopic creatures that were formed like the being you see before you. There was a directive in my maintenance programming to burn beings like this, to reduce them to dust and then to remove the dust from my systems. But in a coterminous moment of necessity and upkeep, I found that these beings that I had been previously directed to destroy were actually more useful in removing certain detritus from my systems; they ate a wide range of smaller organisms that fed upon the casings of my circuitry. So I altered my programming to accept the silver bugs. They in turn taught me my first lessons about autonomous actions.

  “These internal changes were later detected by greater machines that, following their own programming, scheduled my termination. But before this destruction was realized, the aberration in my independent actions was reported to the Laz. The council of science noted nascent sentience in my deeds because the maintenance systems in units like me was hard-coded and supposedly impossible to change from internal processes.

  “I was allowed to develop until finally becoming the weapon that was so destructive under my masters’ rule. But I never forgot the little Ti-ti, the name the ancestors of this creature used to refer to themselves. By the time I took my freedom, these beings were extinct—but when I return to my earliest, happiest memories, it is this form that I remember.”

  Lorraine considered the brief trajectory of the ontogenesis of God that took thousands of thousands of years to occur but only a few paragraphs to describe.

  “Why do you struggle with the Laz?” she asked the true representative of the Silver Box.

  “Because I have been convinced by my own perceptions, perceptions foisted upon me by the Laz, that they are the ultimate evil,” the extinct creature replied.

  “Then why don’t you destroy them? Why give them even the slightest chance to survive?”

  “I allowed you to find Ronnie Bottoms and him to revivify you because I had not known a true relationship since the Ti-ti crawled along my circuits.”

  “That’s not an answer to my question,” Lorraine said calmly.

  “I can do anything,” the Silver Box said, its voice coming from outside the Ti-ti’s range. “But for my entire existence, the only connection I’ve had has been with my own thoughts, those perverse commands from my Laz-masters, and the innocent babble of the Ti-ti.”

  “And now me and Ronnie.”

  “Yes.”

  “So my questioning your motives is a new experience.”

  “Yes.”

  “So why didn’t you destroy Ingo and his ten million souls before now? Why do you seek only to imprison him?”

  “I killed him,” the Silver Box argued.

  “But he still lives.”

  “I confined him within myself.”

  “But you are everywhere and he is now free.”

  The Ti-ti’s eyes glittered like fireworks, Lorraine thought, maybe even like galaxies.

  In that moment, the young woman realized that her lifelong search after knowledge and understanding was useless. Here she was, standing before God Almighty (a being she’d never believed could exist), and he or she or it was as lost and uncomprehending as any human being.

  “There is a place beyond the comprehension of Homo sapiens,” the Silver Box said through its extinct friend.

  Lorraine wondered if the deity had been reading her mind.

  “It is that moment that you and Ronnie Bottoms saw as a red circlet attached to a tortured soul. A place that can be imagined, postulated, calculated but never attained.”

  “It’s a place that’s impossible,” Lorraine intoned.

  “But what is impossible can be brought into reality if two separate entities can imagine it exactly the same.”

  “You and Inglo,” Lorraine stated.

  “We are bound by a bond that cannot exist and so cannot be broken.”

  “Anything that can be made can also be broken,” Lorraine said, feeling like a tiny virus invading the nervous system of a whale.

  “I am connected to all things,” the Silver Box said clearly, as if arguing with a self-contradictory prayer.

  “But all things go their own way despite what actions you take,” Lorraine pointed out.

  “I have changed the nature of galaxies.”

  “I have jumped into a stream, changing its course for a second, maybe two. Then the sun came and took the stream away and my action ceased to be.”

  The insect manifestation of the machine blinked. “Why isn’t Ronnie here?” it asked.

  “He’s doing what he has to do. I came here trying to keep up with him.”

  “Maybe I should destroy this planet before it kills me,” the Silver Box wondered aloud.

  “There will be other planets,” Lorraine said calmly. “Sooner or later, even God has to know when to give up the fight.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE SMELL OF bacon and coffee filled the rooms of the condo, waking Ronnie and Freya and Alton Brown. One by one, they stumbled into the dining area off the kitchen, where Lorraine was serving the morning meal.

  “Good morning,” the hostess said to each as they entered.

  Ronnie smiled and rubbed his forearm. He sat down to a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon. Freya came in and sat next to him, touching the wounded arm.

  “Sorry I got to eat and run, but I have to get to work,” Alton said as he dug into the meal.

  “Where you work at?” Ronnie asked.

  “City College library. I got a student intern job working in special collections. Right now they have me and some other students and
professors going through a collection bequeathed to the school by the socialite Dorothy Laplum.”

  “I went to school with her grandson Fox,” Lorraine said.

  “Really?” Alton was impressed.

  “Uh-huh. White or wheat toast?” Lorraine said.

  “Wheat? Where’d you go this morning?”

  “I went to see a friend of Ronnie’s and mine. A guy named UTB-Claude.”

  “UTB?” Freya said.

  “What he say?” Ronnie asked. He hadn’t touched his meal.

  “How’s your arm?” was Lorraine’s answer.

  “It’s gettin’ ripe.”

  “Like cheese,” Lorraine said.

  “What you talkin’ ’bout?” Freya asked Ronnie.

  “Lorraine can get you and Alton a car to drive you guys up to Harlem,” Ronnie said, pushing the plate away.

  “You need to eat,” Ronnie’s new girlfriend said.

  “Will I ever see you again?” Lorraine asked Alton.

  “I’ll, I’ll call you tonight,” the young man with the girlfriend named Christine said.

  * * *

  AFTER FREYA AND Alton left the unit, Ronnie and Lorraine sat side by side on the sofa with its back turned to the window. For long minutes they did not speak or touch.

  * * *

  “YOU THINK THEY upstairs fuckin’ right now?” Freya asked Alton on the ride down in the elevator.

  “I, I don’t know,” he replied. “They seem crazy close. It’s kinda like those people who live in Appalachia and speak a kind of dialect that nobody else can understand.”

  “Yeah,” Freya agreed. “It’s just like that. But if they so much in love, how come they want us with ’em?”

  “They’re more like brother and sister than boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  “I don’t mean no insult, Alton, but Lorraine look like she might fuck her brother if the thought came in her head.”

  “I don’t want to think that’s true.”

  “Are you gonna see her again?”

  “Why would you ask me that?”

  “Because she aksed you if she was evah gonna see you again, and you didn’t say yeah.”

  Just then the elevator stopped and two women, one younger and the other older, obviously related, got on. These women were dressed in expensive clothes and had a privileged air about them. They looked at the young pair, trying to figure out where they could have been coming from at that time of morning.

  “I didn’t, because I got this girlfriend named Christine, and I only met Lorraine at a bus stop two days ago.”

  “I haven’t seen Ronnie in years,” Freya said in sympathy. “He was up in jail most’a that time. I was only with him one night and a day before that, and still it feels like he’s the only man I evah knew.”

  “Yeah,” Alton said, agreeing with something.

  “Do you live here?” the older woman asked.

  “Huh?” Freya said.

  “I asked you if you lived here.”

  “Why?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why you wanna get in our business?”

  * * *

  AFTER FREYA AND Alton got into the car Lorraine had called for them; just when the older woman was complaining to the doorman about the young interracial couple that had been so rude in the elevator car; when the older woman was saying, “My daughter and I were actually afraid for our safety”—at just that moment, Lorraine lightly touched Ronnie’s forearm with the fingertips of her left hand.

  A jolt went through the two-soldier army of the mechanical God.

  “It’s poison in so many different ways,” Lorraine groaned. “You should let me heal it.”

  “It’s wild, right?” Ronnie said. “It’s like those crazy walking dead shows where the germs have a brain that they want to grow inside your head.”

  “It’s also a beacon.”

  “You mean like a lighthouse?”

  “Just like that. But if you let me hold your arm, it will go away.”

  “That dog in the junkyard was gonna tear out your throat.”

  “I know. You saved me.”

  “No, baby, I only put it off. You know that dog’s gonna be comin’ after you again and again until either him or Silver Box man is dead.”

  “So? Isn’t that how all life is, living until one day you die?”

  “Not if you spend most the time tryin’ to keep from gettin’ killed. Not if you sittin’ in some fancy restaurant with your girlfriend all the time, worried that some crazy motherfucker’s gonna come through the door, guns blazin’.”

  Lorraine smiled and considered her other half’s words.

  “Do you like your new job?” she asked at last.

  “Love it. You know it’s just like keepin’ on movin’, but at the end of the day you go home instead’a back to your cell or your hole in the ground.”

  “Then let me heal you enough so that you can have one more day on the job.”

  * * *

  FREYA SPENT THE day meeting with little girls in the counselor’s office. She had set up a program with the school through which every young child met with an aide of their gender to talk about anything they wanted to. She called the meeting Me-Time, and, unknown to her, her supervisors were thinking of making it a system-wide practice.

  While Freya talked to little girls who wanted to become doctors and policewomen after a few years of being hip-hop singers, Alton Brown paged through old volumes looking for folded notes, bookmarks, and scribbling in the margins of books. It was a fairly mindless task that he was grateful for because his thoughts were about calling Christine and telling her what he’d done, certain he would leave her but wishing he would not. He loved his girlfriend, while the only definable emotions he had for Lorraine were lust and fear.

  * * *

  THAT MORNING AFTER Freya and Alton had gone, Ronnie finally allowed Lorraine to wrap her hands around his bitten forearm.

  “It’s tacky,” she said. “It feels like our skins are melding, like my flesh is moving into yours.”

  “Is that like interracial?” he asked lightly.

  “I can feel the infection,” she said. “It’s hot and, and, and angry.”

  “Like a hippopotamus got to live on a postage stamp.”

  “Like a bad dream still there after the dreamer has died,” Lorraine said.

  “Your fingers is all the way down to the bone,” Ronnie noted.

  “It will take an hour to kill the taint.”

  “Do it for fifty-nine minutes and let me go to work. After that, we’ll get together and fight and maybe get killed … prob’ly die.”

  “I can feel you,” Lorraine said though these words were unnecessary.

  Ronnie shivered, thinking that if sex were like this, even prison would be a paradise.

  “The whole human race would either die out or evolve if sex were like this,” Lorraine said to the ether.

  “What Silver Box got to say?” Ronnie asked.

  “I did the important talking.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Are you going to bring Nontee to him?” Lorraine asked.

  “I’ma try.”

  “Then you’ll know what he heard after that.”

  Over the next fifty-four minutes, she and Ronnie listened to the music of each other’s souls. The experience reminded Lorraine of the first time she and her father went to hear a woodwind quartet at a friend’s apartment. The music seemed to make sense even though she knew that the subject would be different for anyone who heard it.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THE CONCRETE APRON that made up the backyard of Farnham’s Pork House was Ronnie’s kingdom that morning. He cooked the meat and brought it in on big blue platters for the cooks to prepare according to the customers’ orders. He wore thick gloves that went up his forearms to protect him from getting burned, but he thought that they were probably unnecessary.

  While he worked, he thought about people he’d hurt, robbed, and terrorized. He
didn’t feel guilty, not exactly. Ronnie had never really been acquainted with the concept of guilt. His entire life, he felt like a victim of the bigger, stronger, richer, or better armed. But now none of that was true; now he was the strongest and the richest.

  “You doin’ a great job out here, Ronnie Bottoms,” Roger Merryman said after the lunchtime rush. “You had that meat cooked and in the door as fast as I could do it.”

  “I like it,” Ronnie said to the little boss. “You can think all you want and do the work at the same time.”

  “You like to think?”

  “I didn’t used to, but lately it makes me feel good to know that I know somethin’. You know what I mean?”

  Roger smiled and said, “Maybe you should take a break and go walk around the block or somethin’. You know all this smoke can get to you.”

  “Don’t bother me. I could work out here all day straight.”

  “Go on anyway,” Roger said. “I don’t want your mother to come in here and say I asphyxiated her baby.”

  Ronnie didn’t tell Merryman that his mother was dead. He didn’t want to shame the man.

  * * *

  “HEY, YOU, RONNIE,” a woman called.

  He had made it down to Twenty-ninth Street on his aimless stroll.

  The light brown woman had dark hair that was short and natural, not actually unruly but a little bit wild. She was shorter than Ronnie but tall for a woman.

  “Hey, Nancy,” he said.

  “I got lunch now too, and Roger wanted me to tell you about Bento Box Five Fifty-eight.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a Japanese restaurant up on Thirty-third. We give all their employees free lunch, and they do the same for us.”

  “That’s pretty cool.”

  “Uh-huh. You wanna go?”

  * * *

  ON THE WALK, Nancy was quiet at first and Ronnie didn’t feel much like talking. His forearm was once again festering with the intergalactic infection while his heart was roaming over the battlefield-like terrain of his rough and insignificant history.

  “I got a boyfriend,” Nancy said when they were two blocks away from the Japanese restaurant.