Blue Light (10 page)

Gray Man wanted to be freed from the flesh. He imagined ripping off the old coat called Horace LaFontaine and flooding up from the earth toward home. That infinite journey from which he could return and tell them that it was all a mistake, that perfection had already been obtained, that he was the ultimate.

But before that could happen there would have to be much death. Many lights would have to be extinguished. Many lights.

Horace LaFontaine gagged and tried to rise up from his bus stop bench. He wanted to throw himself in front of the truck rushing down the street. He almost made it, but Gray Man reached up and stopped him dead in his tracks.

It was time to go see Uncle Morris and Joclyn.

“So you wanna room?” Morris Beakman asked Grey Redstar, recently from elsewhere.

“Yes, Mr. Beakman,” Gray Man answered. “I’m looking for work at the university and I have some cousins who live somewhere around here. I’d like to find them also.”

“What’s their names?” Beakman asked. He was a tall brown man with a broad stomach. His hair was gray and his nose had been broken more than once. He towered over Death.

“Azure,” Gray Man said and smiled. “The Azures.”

“Never heard that name before,” Beakman offered. His eyes seemed to be searching the prospective tenant for something.

“I’m willing to pay you three months in advance, Mr. Beakman. I’ll be very quiet and I won’t have any visitors, I give you my word.” Gray Man stifled his desire to kill the landlord. He knew there would be no profit and little pleasure in the act.

“I don’t take no mess, Mr. Redstar,” the large man said. “I don’t want no problems.”

“All I need is a place to sleep and study, sir,” Death said. “I’ll take my meals out and I don’t listen to your music.”

“What do you mean
my
music?”

“Just a way of speaking, sir. I don’t own a radio, that’s what I meant.”

“Well, you know, I usually only rent to students. But you got problems with your students too. Girls just seem to want to take advantage, and the boys all wanna get into Joclyn’s panties. …”

“I just need a place to sleep and study, sir,” Gray Man said again.

In the weeks to follow Gray Man took long walks around San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. He didn’t go into the parks much because fewer people were there. He wandered down streets both rich and poor, tasting the air and listening with ears that could hear the music of light.

When Gray Man wasn’t searching he burrowed down under consciousness. While he slept, Horace was free to wander in the body that was no longer his. At these times there was nothing of Gray Man in Horace’s mind, but he still felt as if he were being held prisoner in his bones. He was rarely hungry, and even though Gray Man had money in his pockets, Horace dared not spend it. Mainly because the money came from the corpses of men and women that Gray Man had killed and robbed.

Horace was sick of violence and blood. He never wanted another soul to feel pain because of him.

With no money he could spend, no real freedom, and Gray Man liable to reappear and torture him at any time, Horace stayed around his sister’s home. He wandered up and down the stairs and out into the backyard under the big oak. Morris Beakman was a construction foreman in the daytime and a cook at Logan’s Bar and Grill most evenings. Horace rarely saw Morris, and when they did meet, few words passed between them.

But Joclyn was always home when she wasn’t at nursing-school classes. Her parents paid room and board at Morris’s house, and the construction foreman/cook paid her twenty dollars a week to keep the place clean.

Joclyn liked Mr. Redstar when he wasn’t putting on airs. That’s what she told Horace one day when he was counting blades of grass in the backyard.

“I don’t ever say more than hi when you got airs, Mr. Redstar,” she said. “I know that you must be thinkin’ somethin’ or wonderin’ where your family might be.”

Horace explained that he had a mental condition, that when his face looked cold she should leave him alone because that’s when he was crazy.

“Real crazy?” the nursing student asked.

“Yeah,” Horace responded gravely. “Sometimes so crazy that I think everybody might be better off if I was dead.”

“Oh, don’t say that, Mr. Redstar,” Joclyn complained. “You’re a real nice man. So sensitive and quiet-like. Sometimes all that craziness is just in your mind. You know, I feel like that sometimes. I get real lonely, you know? Even if I’m wit’ people and I’m laughin’ or dancin’. I mean, I could even be kissin’ some boy an’ I still feel all by myself.”

Horace didn’t say a word. He just stared. For him the heartfelt chatter of her life was like a doorway out from his own misery. The smile on his face felt rare, almost alien.

Joclyn noticed his queer smile and ducked her head, mumbling, “I guess I shouldn’ta said that, about kissin’, I mean.”

Horace pressed his fingers lightly on the girl’s forearm. He didn’t even know that he was touching her until she looked up.

“That’s okay, girl. I know about kissin’.”

She smiled and a rumble went off in Horace’s chest.

For months after that he had a schoolboy crush on Joclyn. Whenever Gray Man sank into his dark realm of reflection, Horace ran down the stairs, looking for his new friend. What he loved was to listen to her talking about her courses and parents, her
sometimes
dates and her dreams. Horace even helped in the cleaning to spend time with her. They mopped and washed and talked and talked.

They never let her Uncle Morris find them together. It was like an illicit affair, some secret liaison that they maintained under strictest secrecy.

Whenever Morris came home, Horace sprinted up the stairs with a gait that defied his age. He never spoke more than two words to the landlord because he couldn’t make himself sound like the articulate Gray Man. He worried that the landlord might become suspicious and try to evict Death.

“You ever wonder about evil?” Horace asked Joclyn one day when they were drying dishes together.

“I don’t know,” she replied. The happiness in her voice was common when she spent time with her friend. “I mean, there’s a lotta bad in the world. But somebody bad can always come to be good too. That’s what they say in my church.”

“What I mean is way past church. Way past.”

Joclyn put down the glass she was drying.

“You talkin’ ’bout that mental illness again?”

Horace looked into his only friend’s eyes.

“It’s okay, Mr. Redstar,” Joclyn said. “You’re a good man. You just get a little stiff sometimes. I know you ain’t evil, ’cause evil destroys itself. My minister says that too. Evil has to lose ’cause he hate everything, even himself.”

Horace smiled as he began stacking dishes on the light blue doorless shelves above the sink. Just outside the window, in a dwarf lemon bush, he could see a huge black-and-yellow garden spider waiting in the center of her web.

When Joclyn left for school that afternoon, Horace saw her to the door.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For helping me. For showing me the truth. And you don’t have to worry about the downstairs toilet, I’m gonna clean it up real good.”

Horace took Joclyn’s cleaning bucket to the small water closet next to the kitchen. In the yellow bucket was a scrub towel, ammonia, some detergent and scouring powder, and a small plastic bottle of bleach.

Gray Man stirred as Horace closed the toilet door. He stretched his mind to semi-wakefulness as Horace got down on his knees before the bowl. For so long Gray Man had considered the crystalline equations of light that he found it difficult to attach meaning to a simple chemical reaction. Before Gray Man could arouse himself, Horace had poured the ammonia into the bowl. Before Death could reach into his glove, Horace’s hand, the corpse laced the ammonia with bleach. Before Death could restrict his lungs, Horace inhaled deeply the mustard gas.

As Horace lost consciousness, I was thrown fully into the mind of Death. Everything in that consciousness was disintegrating, falling into dust. Horace dying, already dead. His last act was that of a hero killing his inner demon.

But then Gray Man screamed. He would not leave without fulfilling his self-proclaimed mission. And for a second time he resurrected the husk of Horace LaFontaine. Reassembling shattered cells and broken capillaries, he writhed there before the toilet bowl until finally he began to vomit. Black bile and poisons gushed from the dead man’s lips into the tainted water. Gray Man pushed himself out into the kitchen and staggered up the stairs. In his room he took out a special plug that ran a bare wire from the wall socket. He sat on the brown sofa chair, sucking on electricity.

The light within him remembered the internal workings of Horace’s body. The hatred within him recalled Horace the man.

Again they were on an open plain under a crazy sky. Horace found himself on his knees before a towering Grey Redstar.

“Fool!” Death shouted.

Horace, his courage gone, trembled.

“I warned you!” Death declared. “Didn’t I warn you?”

There were no thoughts or words within Horace. All he had left was the anticipation of pain.

The following weeks passed like centuries. Writhing in his Attica hole, skinless and demented, Horace LaFontaine could not scream, because his lips were sewn; he could not breathe, but suffocation did not bring death.

While Horace suffered in the recesses of his own mind, Gray Man finally caught the scent of one of the Blues. On one of his long walks he heard the ripple of a complex strain, music that spoke a language far beyond the range of life. He followed that melody until it led him to Phyllis Yamauchi’s empty home. He broke in through a side window and then walked down a long corridor to the memory of a prison cell and the recollection of a man.

“Horace.” Gray Man smiled at his prisoner. “You’ve been bad and you have to suffer for it.”

Horace looked up at his captor without recognizing him as the source of his pain. He had come to believe that his sins in life had made this hell. Gray Man was just the executor of the sentence. That’s why he could not be killed.

“Would you like to go back for a while again, Horace?”

His skin grew back and his mouth sucked air. Horace appeared on the desert plain with Gray Man.

“You would have to promise not to try and kill me, though,” Gray Man said. “You can’t kill me, you know, but you could cause me a great deal of grief and delay.”

Horace could speak but did not.

“Would you like to go back?” Gray Man asked again.

“Yes.”

Sitting on the edge of Phyllis Yamauchi’s sofa chair in her living room, Horace simply enjoyed the rhythm of his breath. It reminded him of waves at the shore. He wondered then if the ocean was actually breathing, soaking up the sun and stars in its heart and thinking about those long-ago times that sang in Gray Man’s soul.

Gray Man had a soul, but Horace did not. Horace was, he knew, just like a thinking rock, a mechanical doll that made a mistake and thought he had a heart.

Hours later Phyllis Yamauchi opened the door and walked in. Gray Man was deep in his solitary cave, and Phyllis did not know him to be there.

She looked at the stranger with no fear.

Horace stared back at her, wondering why his executor cared about her.

“Who are you?” Phyllis asked.

“My name is Horace.”

“What do you want here? Are you going to rob me?”

“I just wanna die,” Horace said. He sobbed and then choked as if he were experiencing a bout of nausea.

Gray Man leaped into his consciousness like a pouncing lion. And in that brief fraction of a second before he was exiled again, Horace saw the true nature of Phyllis Yamauchi. She was blue, all blue, and sparkling. Tendrils and spikes and curving wings of light spread from her body. Somewhere over her shoulder was an orb of maddeningly dark blue.

The presence of Gray Man, as he rose in the corpse’s body, struck at her like a gale. The blue in her was tinged with yellow for a moment, and then Horace was in his grave. Dead and buried far below the consciousness of Gray Man.

It took less than five seconds to squash the life from Phyllis Yamauchi. Gray Man used his inhuman strength and his claws and his teeth and the electricity that flowed in him. But in those few seconds all the force of life in the small woman exploded outward. Horace felt the vibrations in his grave.

Gray Man fell back from the small body weak and in pain. He dragged her down to the basement. He stripped himself naked and stripped her too. Then he performed a ritual of death that he had created long before in the northern California desert, all the while singing a long, whining dirge.

W
HEN I WOKE UP
, the dirge was still in my ears. I had passed out on the floor. Gray Man and Horace were still alive in my senses, but I didn’t feel afraid. Somehow Ordé had passed his newfound courage on to me.

Ordé and Reggie were gone. I went to the front door and opened it on a beautiful Bay day. The sun was bright but the air was cool. My heightened senses were more in order. I could look deeply into things if I wanted, but I had to push it. And somehow the plain grass and simple concrete took on a special beauty for me.

I didn’t know where to go, so I made it up to Ordé’s rock. None of the Close Congregation was there, as it was a Tuesday. There were people in the park, of course. Baseball players, old men on their constitutionals. There was a young woman holding a red-haired child about three or four years of age. She was slight, in her mother’s arms, gazing into my face with all the amazement of a newborn. It was a little disconcerting to have a small child stare so intensely, almost as if she were interrogating me. Her eyes were so dark and unwavering that I could almost feel the weight of their intent. That’s when I looked closer. I could sense in her face something blue.

The mother, who had been looking around, noticed the child’s fixed stare and looked at me. She tried to turn the girl, to talk to her, but the child kept moving her head to look at me. She was saying something to her mother that I couldn’t hear.