Blue Light (12 page)

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.

When Ordé caught sight of me, he nodded and started his speech.

“Death comes among us, my friends,” he said softly. “Death and life.”

He looked over to his left, and I saw Addy standing there, looking haggard, with Julia in her arms. Julia smiled when our eyes met.

“This is my daughter,” Ordé said. “Alacrity.”

There were ahhs and nods among the crowd. I thought that the name fit her well, and I understood why she said that Julia was not her name.

“She has come to bring us joy while Death nips at our souls,” Ordé said. “An abomination of blue light has come among us. A man who should be dead but who is not. A Gray Man. A man who died but who came back among us. He wants to kill all the Blues. He has already killed Phyllis Yamauchi. He wants to and plans to kill us all. He has great powers and has no debt to the body of life. He only wants death, silence, nothingness.”

Everyone listened. Most of them, I believe, thought that Ordé was speaking in metaphors, images, symbols. They didn’t believe in a Gray Man. Who would?

“This is the last day of our meeting,” Ordé said. “It’s time to get on with life. We must spread out to the larger world and disperse the music as best we can. We must sing and we must survive because the future of everything depends on this struggle. Death cannot take us if we move beyond his knowledge. The world is wide and he is but one man, not even a man, just half a man. His will is indominate, but we are like air.”

“You don’t really mean that we can’t meet again, do you?” Alice Rodgers asked. She was one of the Close Congregation, a citizen, a human.

“Not you, Elan,” Ordé responded, using his name for her. “You can keep on meeting. You should. Only the Blues have to go. But we’ll send a messenger to you later on. Someone who will lead you on the journey.”

“No!” a man shouted.

And then another.

Soon almost all of the Close Congregation were chanting no. Meanwhile, the Blues, hearing the word
death
and fearing it, had gathered up around Ordé’s rock. The crowd seemed almost hostile, almost as if they were going to attack Ordé and his brethren.

Over the heads of the angry crowd I could see Alacrity begging me with her eyes.

And then the simple, almost silent word “yessssssss” hissed in everyone’s ears. It was a word and it was spoken, but it was as if it had been whispered to each one of us.

He was right behind me, the torturer of Horace LaFontaine. His suit was black and his shirt red. I moved out around the crowd and made my way toward my teacher’s side. The rest of the Close Congregation turned to the soft-spoken refutation of their demands.

“I am Grey Redstar,” he said. “It is time for death.”

The first man he reached was Ordé’s bodyguard Jason Feldman. Jason reached out to stop the skinny black man. We all heard his arm snapping. No one believed it when Jason’s body went flying over the mob at Ordé.

The teacher ducked, and Gray Man plowed into the innocent mortals, breaking bones and rending skin.

“Halt!” Miles Barber shouted. He had jumped out of some hiding place in the trees and approached the zombie. He wore a straw-colored suit with green, red, and black lines sewn crazily through it. He held a large pistol with both hands.

As Gray Man broke the neck of Ordé’s second bodyguard, Alexander, Miles Barber fired. Gray Man turned. All I could see was his back, but the fear that blossomed in the policeman’s face told the story.

Ordé shouted, “No!” and ran toward Gray Man. He was fast, but not quick enough to save Barber’s face from becoming pulp.

Ordé jumped upon Gray Man, followed by Gijon and Zero.

My teacher was torn in two. I saw his back as he fell upon Gray Man and then I saw him come apart, giving off a shower of blood and dying blue sparks.

The Close Congregation scattered, shouts following them down from Ordé’s rock. I looked around for Addy and her daughter. They had moved back toward the trees. By the time I turned to see about Gijon and Zero, they were both dead, just bloody pieces on the ground.

I considered whether I should try to stop Gray Man or help Ordé’s widow and child.

Then I realized that Gray Man was closing in on Wanita, Reggie’s little sister whom Ordé had nicknamed Dreamer. She had her hands out in front of her like claws. Gray Man smiled and prepared to destroy her, but just then Eileen Martel stood before him. She grabbed him by both wrists and stood her ground.

With my vision I witnessed the towering blue flame above her. The darker blues of Gray Man rose also. The lights burned no longer than ten seconds. People were still shouting and running. Paula McDunn, an unemployed RN from San Francisco, ran past me, her face covered with blood.

Suddenly the lights vanished and Eileen fell to her knees. I yelled to bolster my own confidence and ran at Gray Man. I was more than forty yards from them. I knew that Eileen would be dead before I got there, but I ran anyway.

I leaped over Eileen and grabbed Gray Man. He fell to the ground and I froze. It was when he screamed that I realized that our enemy had fled.

“Lemme up!” Horace LaFontaine, Gray Man’s dead host shouted, “lemme up!”

He scrambled out from under me and ran, fell, and tumbled away from the scene.

Most of the Close Congregation had also fled. Myrtle Forché and Claudia Heart were gone. Reggie and Addy came up to Eileen, Wanita, and me. Wanita was crying over Eileen, who had fallen on her side. Her face was the color of ash. I could see that she was trying to rise, but it was as if her body weighed a ton and she just couldn’t lift it.

She opened her mouth, which, along with her eyes, was flooded with blue light. Then everything was dimmed.

“We gotta go!” little Alacrity said.

And we did.

A
FTER ORDÉ’S DEATH, AND
the deaths of so many others I’d loved, I took Adelaide and the children and ran. We found our way to the forests north of San Francisco, living off the checkbook I’d kept for Ordé. We were running for our lives, but sadness, not fear, was our common companion.

Whole days were spent when Addy and I never said a word. We were horrified and numb. The children played or watched TV, when the motel we stayed in that week had a TV, but they cried before going to sleep every night. Wanita had nightmares about losing an eye or a limb. Reggie ran in his sleep, jittering in his bed like a dog, remembering some fright from the day before.

Alacrity called out for the father she’d known only a few hours. The only way she’d go to sleep was for me to sit next to her and stroke her shoulders.

I read the newspapers every day looking for news about Gray Man or Horace LaFontaine. But there was no news about the massacre after the first couple of weeks. Miles Barber had survived Gray Man’s attack, though he was badly disfigured and severely injured. One account that described his condition said that he had to be held in restraints to keep him from tearing the flesh from his face. He was in constant pain and ranted continually about the devil roaming the world.