Inside a Silver Box

by Walter Mosley

  “What’s his name?”

  “Noli.”

  “Where’s that from?”

  “Mississippi.”

  “I never heard no name like that before.”

  “I’m just sayin’ that I’m not tryin’ to go out with you.”

  “I know. Roger told you to show me where to get my lunch at. That’s all.”

  * * *

  RONNIE WAS INTRODUCED to the manager named Hiro and they were seated at a booth in the back of the fast-food sushi and noodle restaurant. They didn’t order but were just served a large Styrofoam partitioned box with cold, pressed scrambled egg, raw mackerel and tuna, rice stewed with seaweed, and four teriyaki chicken thighs.

  “We supposed to share?” Ronnie asked Nancy.

  “Uh-huh. That’s what their waiters do.”

  After they ate for a while, Nancy said, “I didn’t mean to insult you.”

  “About what?”

  “When I said I had a boyfriend.”

  “That’s all right. I know. When a young woman come walk next to a man, she got to make it clear or the next thing you know, he got his hands all ovah her. I used to be like that. All a girl had to do was look at me and I was ready to take her upstairs.”

  The barbecue waitress smiled and then laughed. “But you’re not like that anymore?”

  “Naw.”

  “How come? You don’t care about girls no more?”

  “I got other stuff on my mind.”

  “Like what?”

  “People I knew … I mean I was around ’em but I’idn’t really know ’em. You know I was so busy fightin’ and gettin’ high, fuckin’ an’ stealin’ that I missed what was goin’ on around me wit’ people.”

  “Your family?”

  “Like that, yeah.”

  “Roger says that you’re the strongest man he ever met.”

  “Huh.”

  “He says that he saw you press near about seven hundred pounds.”

  “I guess.”

  “You must’a busted some people up pretty bad if you that strong.”

  “I only got strong after I gave up my bad ways.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “If I knew that, girl, I’d be king of the world.”

  Nancy took in a deep breath and reached across the table to take Ronnie’s hand. “You’re hot,” she said of his skin temperature.

  “I thought you had a boyfriend.”

  “I did too.”

  * * *

  LORRAINE FELL RAN four times around Manhattan Island and then returned home to find building maintenance men working on her study. They were boxing up her books and moving a bed into the room.

  “Hi,” she said to the copper-skinned Puerto Rican men.

  “Miss Lorraine,” the oldest worker, Felix Rodriguez, said.

  “If you get hungry or thirsty, just take what you want from the refrigerator.”

  After that brief conversation she took out her e-pad and searched the internet for a name she knew but had never heard spoken.

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER she was pressing the buzzer of an apartment in an old brownstone building three blocks up from the northern border of Central Park.

  “Hello,” came a man’s voice over the intercom.

  “Mr. Purcell?”

  “Yes?”

  “Myron Purcell?”

  “Yes. Who is this, please?”

  “You don’t know me. My name is Lorraine Fell. I need to ask you a few questions.”

  “About what?”

  “Ronnie Bottoms.”

  In the ensuing, telling silence Lorraine thought about the nut-brown young man Myron Purcell had been. His hairline was already receding at the age of twenty-nine—the last time Ronnie had seen him. It was another man’s memory, but Lorraine knew it as well as she knew the smell of her father’s pipe.

  “You alone?” the disembodied voice asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be right down,” Myron Purcell said at last.

  A young mother and her little girl were walking down the sidewalk. Really only the woman was walking. The girl had a pink plastic jump rope and was skipping her way down the street. The little girl’s hair was done up in five pigtails and her skin was near black, like her mother’s. Lorraine could see the love of the mother in the way she slowed down and speeded up to keep even with the erratic pace of the concentrated child’s play.

  “Do I know you?” a man asked from behind.

  He was five six at most and nearly bald at the age of thirty-seven. His face seemed friendly but he was frowning. Lorraine noted and remembered that he had thick eyebrows and powerful hands. As a child, Ronnie had been impressed by how large Myron’s penis was.

  “No, Mr. Purcell. My name is Lorraine Fell.”

  “You said that already.” He forced an impatient tone. “You also said that this was something about Ronnie?”

  “I came here on his behalf. He’s been through what you might call a transformation.”

  “Like he’s found religion or something?”

  “More like religion found him,” she said. “But not in the form of any organized praise.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He’s not angry anymore.”

  “Ronnie not angry?” Myron said. “You mean he’s dead?”

  Lorraine’s smile was almost a laugh. No one knew nor had anyone ever known Ronnie as well as she did. But Myron’s question came close. Almost every memory in Ronnie’s head had been tainted by anger or fear.

  The young white woman’s mirth leavened Myron’s frown.

  “Can we go sit somewhere?” Lorraine asked.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Myron said with a one-shoulder shrug, “but I’m not goin’ anywhere with anybody says they know Ronnie Bottoms.”

  “I understand. I just need the answers to a couple of questions, and then I’ll leave you alone.”

  * * *

  NANCY CROSSED OVER to Ronnie’s side of the booth of her own accord. When she kissed him, he could feel her trembling.

  “I’ont why I’m doin’ this,” she said when taking a breath. “I mean I don’t even know you.”

  “Noli is a lucky man,” Ronnie said in reply.

  “To have his woman cheatin’ like this?”

  “This isn’t cheating.”

  “No? Why you say that?” She kissed him again. It was a long, lingering kiss.

  “Cheating,” he said after that closeness, “is when you don’t feel bad. This is just somethin’ you had to do.”

  Nancy’s eyes went wide with amazement.

  “What?” Ronnie asked.

  “I just thought of something.”

  “What?”

  “A dream I used to have all the time.”

  “What about?”

  “It’s like,” she stammered. “It’s like my whole life was a hallway, not so long but runnin’ in a circle like. There’s these doors on the way. One got my mama, another one is where my daddy’s buried, Noli is in three or four rooms, and the pork house is there too. Some’a the doors is closed and other ones ain’t open yet.”

  Nancy pressed both hands against Ronnie’s chest and he could tell somehow that these thoughts came from her kisses.

  “In my dream it was like I always been walkin’ down there and then, just now, all of a sudden the hallway just ended,” she continued.

  “Ended?”

  “Uh-huh. Instead’a goin’ on and on I come to a door that leads outta there. I open it up and then there you are in front’a me and the door is slammin’ at my back.”

  “Could you turn around and go back in the hall?” Ronnie asked, a technical note to his words.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah.”

  They kissed again.

  Inside that caress Ronnie wondered at the changes the Silver Box had wrought in him. On every breath he felt that he was inhaling Nancy and in every exhala
tion she was changing. This feeling was something that neither he nor she had ever known. It was something perfect or ideal—like church was to his mother.

  “What time is it?” he asked her after they moved back an inch or so.

  She took out her phone and said, “We should’a been back ten minutes ago.”

  “Maybe we should get back and think about this for a few days,” he suggested. It was only a suggestion. If Nancy had wanted to stay and kiss all afternoon, he wouldn’t have been able to say no.

  “If you don’t get with me, I’m gonna have to quit that job,” she said. It wasn’t so much a threat but a sad revelation.

  “I don’t even know your last name,” he said.

  “Daws. Nancy Nefratiti Daws.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  NANCY’S SHIFT WAS over two hours before Ronnie’s, so she was already gone when he put away his heavy apron and gloves.

  He was thinking about her kisses and that circular hallway as he walked back toward the high-rise condo on Fifth. His arm was throbbing again and the threat of Nontee loomed at the back of his mind but still he was wondering about the close breathing experienced between him and Nancy Nefratiti Daws. It was love between them but not like in books and movies, on TV and in magazines. The love they felt was the passion of being human and knowing that being as a state of grace. That hallway was the prison that she lived in just like jail had been for him. He realized that he had been incarcerated even when he was at liberty; like the people in the parole office.

  While he walked, Ronnie wondered if he could explain any of this to Nancy. How could he make her understand that he grasped these notions through her kisses?

  * * *

  WHEN RONNIE RETURNED to the condo, he found Lorraine sitting there with a hefty black man. He was lifting a coffee cup to his lips and she was just putting down a crystal goblet of red wine.

  The man looked familiar. When he stood up, Ronnie saw that he was quite tall.

  “Ronnie,” the big man said.

  When he smiled, Ronnie recognized him as Jimmy Bywater Burkett, a sometimes suitor of Elsie Bottoms—Ronnie’s mom. It was an odd déjà vu (though that phrase was not in Ronnie’s mind). He had been thinking of Jimmy when Lorraine was partly healing his alien wound. Jimmy was the only person other than Mrs. Bottoms and Miss Peters who seemed to have a continued interest in the angry child’s life. He hadn’t been around very often but whenever he was there child-Ronnie found himself wishing that this traveling bluesman, JB Burkett, was his father.

  By the time all these thoughts went through his head, Jimmy had come up and embraced the young man. It was a big soft fat man’s embrace, and for a moment Ronnie was lost in the feeling. This reminded him of Nancy’s kisses but he didn’t allow himself to be distracted.

  “Do you remember me?” Jimmy asked when he released the young man.

  “I was tryin’ to remember your name just lately, but when I seen you I remembered, Mr. Burkett. How did you know to come here?”

  “I had to go ask your brother Myron,” Lorraine said.

  She had joined them.

  Ronnie didn’t need to ask how she knew about his brother. She and Ronnie were closer to each other than most people were to themselves. When they had bonded in the healing process, they were completely open to one another. There he gleaned her part of the plan that would destroy the potential destroyers of Earth.

  “You’re my son, Ronnie,” tall, black, and fat Jimmy said.

  “You don’t smell like whiskey no mo’,” Ronnie commented.

  “The last time I almost died, I climbed up on the wagon; stayed on it too.”

  “I always wished that you didn’t drink,” Ronnie found himself remembering aloud. “I thought you was funny, but then Mama would kick you out the house.”

  “I never did right by either one’a you.”

  “You still play blues?”

  “Now I play electric guitar for a minister’s services on Sundays and Wednesday nights.”

  “Why don’t we go sit down?” Lorraine suggested.

  * * *

  “YEAH, YEAH,” JIMMY Burkett said, sitting between his son and Lorraine. “Your mother would tell me I couldn’t have no son if I was gonna be a drunk and then the bottle would tell me, ‘To hell with her.’ The bottle was wrong but I didn’t know it until it was too late. Has one’a your eyes always been green, Ronnie?”

  “I got sick and it turned like that.”

  “Your girlfriend here got two different-color eyes too.”

  “That’s how we met,” Ronnie said. “We had the same disease.”

  “And you knew that because’a your eyes?” Ronnie’s newly minted father asked.

  “How come Myron knew where you lived at?” the young man asked, not wishing to prolong the lie.

  “He come to a Wednesday service with this girl he was seein’. He told me you was in jail and I aksed him to tell me when you was out but he said he didn’t know when that would be because he only ever heard about you but you two never talked.”

  “So you’re my father?” Ronnie said, the words feeling like a blessing from his mother’s lips.

  “I am.”

  “That’s good.”

  “You’re lookin’ fit and strong, Ronnie,” Jimmy said. “A little bit different than I remembah, but you look healthy.”

  “My arm hurts some but other than that, I think I’m okay.”

  “What happened to your arm?”

  “Dog in a junkyard bit me.”

  “You go to a doctor? You know it mighta had rabies.”

  “He saw a physician, Mr. Burkett,” Lorraine said. “How does it feel, Ronnie?”

  “Like it’s talkin’ in tongues.”

  * * *

  RONNIE AND LORRAINE saw Jimmy Burkett off at 10:27 that evening. They promised to come to the Sunday sermon at the Pentecostal Revival in Jesus Christ Church.

  Ronnie kissed his father good-bye for the first time in his life.

  Both Alton and Freya called during the evening. Ronnie and Lorraine made plans to see them in a couple of days.

  “If we’re still alive,” Lorraine said to Ronnie after he got off the line with Freya.

  “If the world is still here,” Ronnie replied.

  * * *

  “HOW DO YOU know that Silver Box understood what you were sayin’?” Ronnie asked.

  Lorraine looked up at the wall clock, saw that it was a few minutes past eleven and said, “I don’t know how I know, but I do.”

  * * *

  IT WAS JUST after midnight when Ronnie said, “He’s coming.”

  “You feel it in your arm?”

  Nodding Ronnie added, “He’ll be here soon.”

  “How long?”

  “A hour, maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Is it just one?” Lorraine asked.

  Ronnie nodded.

  She jammed both her hands deep under the skin and into the muscle of Ronnie’s forearm. The was no puncture, tear, or blood, just a merging of two beings that were, on some level, one.

  The trembling vibration moved evenly between both of them. Ronnie gritted his teeth and Lorraine laughed out loud.

  “Is your dick hard, Ronnie Bottoms?”

  “Like a goddamned sledgehammer.”

  “It feels good to heal.”

  “Like the Pentecostals must feel when the spirit get in ’em.”

  After that there were no more words, only images and emotions that passed between them like gravities calling from distant stars.

  Twenty-three minutes later, when Ronnie and Lorraine fell away from each other, they were both exhausted and exhilarated.

  “You better be goin’, Lore,” Ronnie said after another minute or so.

  “What if he kills you?”

  “Then I’ll be dead.”

  “You don’t care if you die?”

  “Not really.”

  “But you have so much to live for.”

  “Did you see when I kissed that
girl today?” he asked.

  “Nancy, right?”

  “I never felt nuthin’ like that before. And you know I been wantin’ to know if Jimmy was my real father my whole life. I got more now than I ever hoped for. So if I got to die to have got that, then I’m all right with it. I’ll take what comes, but you know Nontee ain’t gonna kill me.”

  “No?”

  “The only reason he tried before is ’cause you made him mad. That’s why you got to go, so him and me can have some conversation.”

  “I love you, Ronnie Bottoms.”

  “You are my heart, Lorraine Fell.”

  FORTY

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, swift Lorraine was already in the bosom of Silver Box’s planetary outpost. One minute after that, the intercom sounded in her condo.

  “Yes?” Ronnie said into the mouthpiece.

  “A kid down here named Norman, Noman, Non-sumpin’.”

  “Send him up.”

  * * *

  SITTING ON A blue sofa, looking into the empty offices of the building across the way, Ronnie felt real hunger for the first time since giving birth to the woman he’d murdered. These pangs made him smile and then the doorbell rang.

  He went to the door and opened it without hesitation or trepidation.

  Standing there was a raven-haired white boy, maybe twelve years old, who was slender and wore a black suit with a white shirt and a red string tie made into a bow. The pants were cut off at the knees, making him look like some kind of private school kid in uniform.

  “Nontee?”

  “You can call me Clavell,” the boy said.

  “Come on in, Clavell,” Ronnie said, backing away to make room for his guest.

  The child walked in with an imperious gait that belied his age. He walked to the sofa and plopped down at just the place where Ronnie had been sitting a few minutes before.

  “Get me a soda,” Clavell said.

  “Kitchen’s right through that door.”

  The shadow of a frown on the boy’s face was sinister, but Ronnie could not muster fear.

  “The beacon from the bite went out,” Clavell said. “You should have healed it completely.”

  “How come you don’t call yourself Nontee?”

  “I am him of course, but I have also retained the persona of Clavell Jordan because I have welcomed the Laz into my breast.”

  “Why?”

  “I hate everything,” the boy, not the alien, said.