Ordé had asked me to go down to Pomona to look for Adelaide, to see if she had taken his seed.
“She was sitting right next to me, Chance,” Ordé said. “When the light struck. She was sleeping and so she wouldn’t be transformed, but her skin might have taken in something — she was naked. I don’t know, maybe a little got in through her eyelids. It wouldn’t take much. Find her. Maybe she has our firstborn of Earth.”
I did find her family, but by then their daughter had come and gone. She’d left because her father said that if she came up pregnant, he’d want her to get an abortion.
I got all that from her little sister, Ada, who also told me that if her father found a black man asking after his daughter, he’d take out his shotgun and kill him.
I took her word, on all counts, and left. I didn’t think that Adelaide had actually gotten pregnant. I asked Ada, who was nice enough, and she said that as far as she knew, Adelaide was not pregnant. No one else among Ordé’s peers had managed to conceive. Ordé said that it was because of their potency. He believed that it was more likely for a woman of his kind to take the sperm from a normal man than for a Blue male to impregnate a normal woman. He believed that sperm from the blue light would devour the ova. But Claudia Heart hadn’t conceived either.
There had been a few attempts to intermingle between the Blues, but the effect was quite toxic. Gijon Diaz and Phyllis Yamauchi tried once. The result was a skin rash that spread all over Diaz’s body, and Phyllis developed a fever from which she almost died. Ordé said that it wasn’t a chemical reaction that caused the maladies. He said that the Blues suffered because of something that arose from the original radiance of blue light. Once one had experienced the light in his own eyes, Ordé said, he could not share another’s vision.
“I asked around, and some people said that I might find him around here. Do you know where he is?” Adelaide asked me.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “But you better get away from here until then.”
“Why?”
“Maybe what Julia’s scared about isn’t so crazy. There’s some bad shit goin’ down,” I said, my adopted street tongue slipping in with fear.
“What do you mean?” Adelaide asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Let’s just go,” I said. “I’ll tell you on the way down.”
And I did tell her. I told her about what I knew of Ordé. I told her about his visions and dreams of unity. It sounded ridiculous coming out of my mouth, but I knew the truth of my words and hoped that Addy (that’s what she asked me to call her) would hear that truth.
I didn’t say anything about blood or blood rituals. I didn’t say anything about Ordé reading people’s minds by tasting their blood. But I did tell her about Grey Redstar. I told her that he had already killed Phyllis Yamauchi.
On the walk I carried Julia. She climbed up my arm and onto my back. She once stood up on top of my head and then leaped down, grabbing on to me about the waist.
She was an amazing child.
We walked along the street toward my flophouse room. I was thinking that Addy trusted me with no reason, really. I could have been lying to her about everything. Or I could have been crazy. But that wasn’t a time of distrust. We had our long hair and our drugs and our music. Everything about us, young people, was revolutionary. The way we made love, whom we loved. The best plans were laid in seconds; our greatest leaders denied the history praised in schools.
What was so wonderful about Addy was something that I couldn’t use my newfound sight to see; she trusted me. She took that walk, her daughter in my arms, believing that I wouldn’t harm her.
I thought about Ordé and his light. I had seen his visions, traveled among the stars back to those primal molecules that wound through time and around the universe. I was a drone in a cosmic game larger than anything ever imagined by priest or zealot. I was a half-aware particle in a light much greater than any star. I was life becoming a higher matter.
I was, as Ordé once said, a pool on whose surface shimmered the image of God.
But still Addy offered me something more delicate than a flake of ash rising from a campfire flame. It wasn’t her but her trusting me that said something that couldn’t be felt before it was known.
When we reached my street, Julia stopped playing and jumping around. She wrapped her arms around my neck and held on with all her strength — and she was strong.
The front door of my apartment building led to a shattered green-and-black-tile floor with a bank of tin mailboxes to the right and a stairway straight ahead. There was always a slight smell of urine under the stairway, and no real mail was ever delivered because of theft.
I tried to loosen Julia’s grip as we made it up the stairs, but she only held on more tightly. It was actually getting hard for me to breathe, but I didn’t pay much attention because of the fear emanating from the child.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said.
“Don’t be afraid,” she repeated.
We went up the stairs, me choking, Julia shivering, and Addy bringing up the rear.
Up four flights and we were finally at my door. Filtered sunlight streamed in through a half-closed dirty window at the end of the hall.
I put my key into the lock and turned it. The door blew outward because of a draft caused by an open window inside. I didn’t remember leaving a window open, but I could have; I didn’t have anything worth stealing.
He was looking out the window. His back turned to us. A smallish man, well dressed as far as I could see.
I fell back into the visions I got from Ordé’s blood for a moment. I was looking out of Grey Redstar’s eyes into the bloody entrails of Phyllis Yamauchi. When Death’s hardened hands kneaded and crushed the organs and flesh, small sparks of blue surfaced and extinguished, leaving behind traces that held images of Phyllis’s consciousness. One of these images was me and a trail of footsteps leading to my door.
I hollowed out my stomach and pushed backward, using my toes. Addy grunted and Julia released her grip. The man turned around as I yelled, “Run!”
He was a black man with two large fleshy bumps on his face, one above his left eye and one on his right cheek. For a moment there was sorrow in his eyes, almost an apology. By then I was back out across the threshold. As I slammed the door, my new sight picked up an explosion of deep blue hues.
“Oh, my God!” Addy cried as if she had shared my sight.
“Not that way!” I yelled at her.
She was running toward the window, not the stairs. Our fire escape had rotted away, but the landlord was waiting for the city to make him fix it.
The door behind me flew off its hinges, and Gray Man, in the body of Horace LaFontaine, fell into the hall. I ran down to the window to protect the child and mother, various hues of blue flickering around my second sight.
Julia screamed.
I heard the window open behind me but I couldn’t turn to warn them, because Gray Man was on me. I reached out to stop him; that’s probably what saved my life. He was excited and there was an electrical field around him. The shock threw me on the floor at Addy’s feet. I looked up to see her throw her child through the open window. Before I could rise to help them Gray Man ran up, stepped on my chest, and leaped after the girl.
I raised myself to the sill, fully expecting to see the corpses of both man and child. But what I saw was Gray Man running down the alley behind my building holding a tree branch and looking up at the sky. I followed his gaze until I saw the tiny figure of Julia climbing to the roof of the building across the street. She ran along the edge of the building at great speed and then disappeared.
“Come on!” Adelaide cried.
She was running for the stairs. I limped behind her as well as I could. The electrical shock had turned my muscles to spaghetti. I had to hold on tight to the handrails as I went down the stairs.
“Wait for me, Addy!” I shouted.
When I reached the door she was nowhere that I could see.
<
br /> When I stepped outside someone grabbed me by the arm. I knew it wasn’t Gray Man, so I said, “It’s all right. I can make it.”
“Lester ‘Chance’ Foote?” someone asked.
I looked up to see Miles Barber standing there. He was wearing a two-piece maroon suit and a stained powder blue shirt. There were five uniformed policemen behind him. Three of them were restraining Addy.
“Let me go!” she screamed.
I tried to hit Barber. I balled my fist and threw it, but he sidestepped and I was so weak that the punch dragged me down until I was on the ground.
They cuffed me while Barber said something about murder and arresting me. Addy was yelling about her daughter, but the cops didn’t seem to care.
I couldn’t bring myself to care either. Touching Gray Man had sent shock waves of death up and down my nerves. I was shaking all over, wishing that I had never been born.
Eight
MILES BARBER WASN’T A bad cop. That is to say, he didn’t hate Negroes. He didn’t enjoy other people’s suffering either, I’m sure. But that didn’t mean he’d shrink from violence if it would bring some justice to the situation. He didn’t mind inflicting a little unconstitutional pain.
“Why did you kill Phyllis Yamauchi?” he asked after his friend, Officer Harlan Castro, had hit me on the side of the head with a short length of sand-filled rubber hose.
I felt the pain and heard the question, but I couldn’t react to either. The cool slither of death was still moving along my nerves. It was as if I had died by just touching Gray Man. The feeling of death stayed with me, its images playing over and over in my mind.
I was in a coffin, aware, with no ability to breathe. Days passed like seconds as the coffin deteriorated and the worms ate my eyes.
“Phyllis Yamauchi,” someone said.
I imagined that Gray Man was waiting downstairs. Castro hit me down the center of my forehead with the hose. I fell off the chair, terrified that they would release me into the arms of Death. I wanted to confess, to be put in jail. Maybe in prison I could be free of his touch.
Maybe in prison I could finally kill myself and be forever beyond his designs.
But I also wanted Ordé. I wanted to hear his tempered logic. I wanted to think about a future world where I was welcome in the hearts of stars.
Life beckoned me while Death waited down in the street. The confession hung in my throat. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that I was bleeding.
Then I began to cry.
I hadn’t cried like that since I was a small child. It was a deep shuddering wail of helplessness. The two cops tried to lift me onto the chair, but I was a big man with the coordination of an infant. All they could do was prop me up against the wall.
All I could do was cry.
I tried to confess, but not one word was coherent. Miles Barber was holding a handkerchief against my scalp, trying to staunch the bleeding. But I was moving my head from side to side, seeing death in one corner and something beyond life in the other. I wanted Castro to hit me harder. Miles was talking to me in soft tones intended to pull me out of despair.
After a while it worked.
“Tell me about it, Lester,” he was saying.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Tell me what happened.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Sorry for what?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t, I mean, I’m sorry you can’t kill me too.”
They put me in a locked room by myself. It had an aluminum toilet bowl and an iron cot with interwoven leather straps for a mattress. I crawled under the cot and faced the wall. Almost instantly I fell into a deep sleep. My dreams began as faintly colored visions of corpses at various stages of decay. Long lines of death in shallow graves. As time passed, the landscape of death decomposed, fading to earth tones and then draining toward gray. The world became dimmer and dimmer until there was only a flat gray earth under only slightly lighter gray skies. A soft buzzing filled the air.
I had come to Gray Man’s peace. I saw his world, and then all of my own trepidation vanished.
In my dream I was sleeping.
I awoke on the shore of an infinite beach. There were great white gulls floating lazily in the sky above me. Pulverized quartz in the white sand glittered under a bright sun. I was alone and fully rested, a dreamer awakened from his nightmare into a vision of peace. I went down to the water and watched skinny starfish amble among the rocks, searching for food. They knew nothing of me and my dreams. They simply felt hunger, imagined themselves moving, and lived.
“Time to get up,” someone said.
I was lying on my side at the seashore.
I was lying on my side in the cell.
A shod toe nudged my butt.
I rose up, knocking the metal cot onto its side. The heavyset guard looked down on me. He had a clipboard in one hand and a yellow pencil in the other.
“Get up, Foote.”
The guard walked me down a long concrete corridor. The walls and low ceilings were corroded and painted a pale lime green. The guard was short and fat. I wondered why he didn’t have help moving me, why he wasn’t afraid of me. Then I glanced back over my shoulder and noticed that he was holding his pistol down at his side.
“Keep your eyes front and your arms down, Foote,” the guard said.
At some other time I might have been afraid, but with Death tracing the pathways of my veins, there was little I feared.
“Hold it right there,” the guard said after a minute or so.
To the right was a heavy metal door.
“Face the door,” the guard commanded.
I did as he told me.
“Okay, now lace your fingers behind your neck.”
He reached around me, slipping a round key into its keyhole. He pushed the door inward.
The room before me was smaller than the cell I’d come from. It was further diminished by a wall of bars that dissected it. On the other side sat a smallish white man in a dark blue suit.
“Go on in, Foote,” the guard who was ready to kill me said.
I did as I was told, and the heavy door slammed at my back.
The moment the door closed, the little man stood up. He was taller than I expected him to be, but he was also exceptionally thin.
“Mr. Foote?”
“Uh-huh.”
“My name is Howard Weissman. I’m your lawyer from Legal Aid.”
I didn’t have anything to say, so I sat down in the metal chair provided.
“Do you know why they arrested you, Lester?” Weissman asked. “You don’t mind if I call you Lester, do you?”
There was a large cockroach on the wall behind the bony-faced lawyer. If I remained perfectly still, I could hear slight orange vibrations coming from the bug. The way the lawyer looked at me, he was probably worried that I might have received a concussion during “questioning.”
“Can you hear me, Lester?”
“What’s going to happen now?” I asked.
“They have no case. There’s no evidence. Detective Barber just brought you in for questioning. Did they hit you?”
“So can I leave?”
Weissman nodded. “The papers should be processed in about half an hour. We can sit here and wait until then. Maybe you can tell me why they’re after you for these poisonings. That is, if you want me to help you in the future.”
“There is no future,” I said.
That was the end of our conversation. I spent the next thirty minutes or so watching the cockroach pulsing red and yellow while Weissman watched me.
I went out the front door of the Berkeley police station on the lookout for Gray Man, but he wasn’t there. The sun was shining, bursting with secrets that it wanted to tell me, but I didn’t care to hear them. I walked around the streets, gaping at all the men and women, white and black, old and young. I was thinking about starfish and how I wanted to go down to the ocean and watch them — for days.
“Hey, brother,” a black man in black leather jacket and pants said.
“Hey, brother,” I replied.
My words seemed to have more meaning than they ever had.
“What’s happenin’?” my new friend asked.
“Nuthin’ to it,” I said.
“All right,” he agreed and then walked on.
I walked for hours. The police had released me in the early morning. They had released Addy the night before.
I didn’t care what happened to me. For years suicide had been my final solution. No matter what I felt, no matter what anybody did to me — I could always end it, I could always throw down the final card.
And then I had died. Died from a dead man’s touch. I was neither the vision nor the mind that understood. I was merely a window through which events could be seen. Just a window even unto my own death.
And now, resurrected, I was free for a few hours. I didn’t need anything or anyone. I was no more concerned about truth than the starfish that still navigated somewhere in my mind’s sea.
I was Buddha and Mr. Natural. I was naked to the world, and nobody cared — not even me.
At about noon I found myself in Garber Park. I was hungry and enjoying the gnawing feel in my stomach. I climbed the dirt path up toward Ordé’s rock. It wasn’t until I heard the murmuring of the Close Congregation that I remembered it was Wednesday.
That’s when my reverie broke. I wondered what had happened to Julia. I wondered about Gray Man and if he had killed again.
I was walking, even though I didn’t want to, toward the place I feared most. Nobody made me do it. Nobody asked me to. Ordé had left me alone in his house while he pursued his own ends. I didn’t have to warn him or protect him. There was nothing I could do, and I felt that helplessness. But still I walked toward the Close Congregation because my life had its own path to travel; I was the witness, the invisible chorus of a tragedy far older than the Greeks.
Ordé stood atop his park rock. He surveyed the Close Congregation with something like love in his eyes. He glanced from one face to another and then finally caught sight of me as I came up toward the back of the audience. Among them I could see many of the Blues. Reggie was there holding his little sister’s hand. Eileen Martel, Myrtle Forché, Gijon Diaz, Zero Friend, and Claudia Heart were among the Congregation. I looked at Claudia, trying to recall the passion but could not.
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