Blue Light (22 page)

“I don’t mean like that,” Alacrity said. “I really love you. When I grow up I’m going to marry you and give you a big house and you can read books all day long and we’ll get a telescope and look at the people in the dark stars. The ones that Wanita said don’t have no bodies except just great big eyes in a cave.”

I sighed deeply and kept my silence. It was always disturbing for me to hear the child’s dreams for the future. She had inherited some of her father’s ability with words. I had to fight the nagging sense that her desires were my destiny and my marching orders.

“Reggie an’ Nita comin’,” she said.

Far up the sloping hill behind us the two other children were coming out of the woods. It seemed as if Reggie was skipping adolescence altogether, going straight for manhood. He’d grown almost as tall as me, and his shoulders were amazingly wide. His sister, Wanita, was still a child, though, round-faced and always serious. She and Alacrity were as different as playmates could be. While Alacrity climbed towering pines, Wanita would curl up by the roots and
dream of Alacrity way up there in the wind an’ stuff.

Adelaide and I never questioned the children’s powers. It all seemed natural. This was not only because of our blood experiences. We had both been lost souls before we drifted into Ordé’s orbit. You’ve already heard my story. I learned of Adelaide’s experiences while we were on the run. It wasn’t a long tale, but it had trailed her for years.

There are many circumstances and minor characters in Addy’s story, but I don’t have to bother with them. The elements are a white Christian family, a girl becoming a woman, a boy with a black leather jacket and a knife, and a dark night in an alley off Ventura Boulevard where two boys struggled over their hormones and only one survived. Adelaide never told anyone about her knowledge of the killing. She closed up her heart, opening it only to those men who cared so much about their future that they would never be concerned with her past. I was the first person she had ever confided in. But we were on the run from Death, and very little else seemed important or worth questioning.

The children and their survival had become our purpose; their abilities were our religion. Believing in them, we erased our own suffering.

“It’s over that way for sure, Chance,” Reggie said, pointing south.

“You sure, man?”

“Yeah. It’s over that way.”

“How far?”

“I can’t tell exactly, but it’s pretty far. It’s hundreds of miles, but it’s definitely over that way.”

“And if we get there, you think we’ll be safe for a while?” I asked the young man.

“We’ll be safer. We’ll be safer, but that don’t mean we’ll be safe.”

The memory of Gray Man scuttled under my scalp. But lately the kids hadn’t seemed scared at all. All that time in the woods had healed the fear in their hearts. Reggie knew the safest place to be, or at least he thought he could find it; Alacrity just wanted to play with each of us in turn and run wild in the woods; and Wanita dreamed.

Adelaide and I thought that if Wanita had any powers of godhood like the others, it must have been the power of dreams. She often came to us in the morning with elaborate tales of visions from the night before. I started to get them on a toy tape recorder when I realized that she was somehow reporting on stories that were not of this Earth or maybe not even this galaxy.

Sometimes the little brown girl would wake up in the morning hardly remembering who we were. Even her brother was as unfamiliar to her as some far-off memory. After she’d come back to us, she’d say that her dream took so long that she’d forgotten who she was for a while.

That very morning she had stumbled out of her bunk bed bleary-eyed and confused. She sat at our rough-hewn table and ate her hot bowl of Wheatena in silence. Adelaide noticed the sleep in her eyes and bent down with a moist towel to rub the sand away. Wanita looked at the green-eyed redhead with bewilderment. She touched Addy’s hair, put her fingers to her own cheek. Then she began to speak as if she had already been in the middle of an explanation.

“… they started out really big, like that tower thing on top’s that hill —”

“Coit Tower,” Reggie said as he ate.

“— and they get smaller and smaller, but then they come awake and start to sing,” the dreamer said. “It’s like they was purple glass at first with hot stuff inside, but when they get real small, like a little Christmas tree, then they’s pink with little tears runnin’ down they sideses.”

“Who are they?” Adelaide breathed in the softest possible whisper.

“Like glass,” Wanita said again. “An’ they sing when they get little. Tinkle-like, humming-like, an’ nobody could hear it but them an’ me. All the animals and bugs that drink the little tears think that the glass sticks is just sticks, but they not. They be singin’ an’ laughin’. An’ you could hear ’em everywhere.”

“Where?” I asked gently, but I should have been gentler still.

By the way Wanita looked up, I could tell that she was coming out of the dream.

“Wanita!” I said sharply.

“Huh?”

“Where were the pink sticks made from glass?”

She shrugged and said nonchalantly, “In a place where the sun is blue and the sky is red. Not anywhere that we could go. Except if you dreamed it.”

“Can you go there in your dreams, Wanita?” Addy asked.

“I did last night. Can I have a apple?”

And so went the way of Wanita’s dreams. She traveled the universe at night while we slept. Her mind was gone for what must have felt like weeks or more overnight. Sometimes we worried that she’d be gone so long that she’d forget who she was completely, or even what she was. But that was the way of godhood, I supposed. All Addy and I could do was feed them and listen to them, groom them with our love and respect. And keep them safe from Death.

“There’s something out there, almost like it was music,” Reggie said. “But … but it’s something … it’s something else. Like safe. Safe.”

As soon as Reggie said it, I could
hear
it. Like a whole orchestra of brass and silver horns so far away that I couldn’t even tell what direction they were in. But when Reggie pointed I believed that sound might be coming from that way.

The extra senses I’d gained from Ordé had quieted over time. The stars still sang to me, the bands between the rainbow still revealed new colors, but it had become so normal that I hardly remembered what it had been like to have common senses. And my time around the children had disoriented those perceptions because I could always feel the Blues when they were near. It wasn’t a hard sensation, more like the feeling of a cloud partly blocking the sun.

Their light had hidden the music from me.

“Uh-huh.” Adelaide nodded while closing her eyes, holding her face up as if to feel the wind. “Yeah, I do feel something. It’s like sunlight through water.”

The children and I had gone back to the cabin. I was excited to tell Addy about what I felt. Addy’s senses had been altered by carrying Ordé’s child. She and I had somewhat similar powers, only she couldn’t hear and see things as much. Addy’s ability was more in intuiting what the children were feeling and thinking. They could come to her for advice and she’d interpret what they felt even though the needs of those small blue gods were often things that she had never known.

“Mr. Needham didn’t feel it,” I said.

Needham was the camp handyman. He was an older white gentleman who didn’t mind having an interracial family on the grounds. It was late in the fall and we were the only paying customers. Maybe he would have felt differently if it were the height of summer.

“We can’t hear it either,” Alacrity added. “We just said we could ’cause we were so happy.”

“Uh-huh,” Reggie said. “It’s like I know it’s there, but I can’t really hear it.”

“Probably because it wasn’t meant for normal people or the Blues,” Addy responded, opening her eyes. “This is probably meant for people like Chance and me. It’s like a beacon for the half blind. Reggie probably figured it out because he was looking for someplace safe but it just happens to be where that call comes from.”

“How far away do you think it’s coming from?” I asked.

Addy closed her eyes and held up her face again. After a few moments she shook her head and frowned.

“We gotta go there,” Reggie said.

“Uh-huh,” Alacrity agreed.

“What do you think, Wanita?” I asked our round-faced dreamer.

“ ’Kay,” she answered, as if I had been trying to force her to go.

“I don’t mean you have to go, honey,” I said.

“But we do,” she said softly while fingering her pink sweater. “Like them fishes.”

“What fish?” asked Alacrity.

“The blue ones,” Wanita replied.

Alacrity nodded, making a rare serious frown.

“Then we better get some more campin’ stuff,” Reggie said. “ ’Cause we gotta go way up in the woods an’ I don’t think the road will go all that far.”

We spent the week buying nylon tents and rugged shoes, powdered packets of food and sleeping bags. We had gloves and bug repellent, a shortwave radio, hard candy and chocolate bars to energize little girls. Ordé’s account felt the drain.

We were all happy at the prospect of refuge. But the morning we were to leave, the signal — brass horns, the liquid air, whatever it was — was gone. Reggie was disoriented and uncertain; Addy and I couldn’t hear a thing. We waited for another week for the sensation to return. It came while we were sleeping on a Tuesday night, late. I got everybody up and hustled them into the van, and we drove without stopping except for gas stations and food stores. Addy and I alternated driving and sleeping. We traveled for eighteen hours on highways and secondary roads going south. Two hundred miles or so past San Francisco we hit dirt roads. For another two days we bumped along back roads.

The last drivable road finally came to an end on Friday afternoon. It didn’t end exactly; there was still a clearing there, but it had fallen into disrepair — recently, as far as I could tell. There were trees fallen across it and great upheavals in the ground. We decided to camouflage our VW van and explore. The feeling that came from that way was neither stronger nor weaker. None of us knew how long the trek would be.

Reggie had almost half our gear on his broad shoulders. The pack he carried was impossibly large. He was straining under the weight, but there was something about him when he got on the trail of an idea or imagined destination — he kept on going no matter what.

He mouthed soft drumlike sounds,
pom pom pompom pom
, as he went. Now and then he’d make verbal notes about our passage. “Heavy foot on the light turn. Slashing lines on the left.” Sometimes he’d stop and look around like a small child who has temporarily lost sight of his mother in a crowded supermarket.

“You okay, Reggie?” I asked once when he seemed a bit lost.

“Yeah, man,” he replied. “You know what, Chance?”

“What?”

“My sister’s been here?”

“Wanita?”

“No, uh-uh. Luwanda’s been here,” he said.

“You mean you were here with your sister before she died?” I asked.

“I was once, but she been here since then. She been here ’cause this the place where we come together.”

Alacrity carried a pack almost as big as she was. She didn’t seem to mind the weight, though. She moved playfully up and down the path, over fallen trees and down into woods to explore. She wasted more energy than the rest of us used, but she was never tired. Her blond hair knotted on itself, and dried mud clung to her boots and jeans.

As I watched the child of my teacher dart in and out between the trees, I got the first glimpse of her purpose among us.

I had begun to believe that there was purpose to each light that began these creatures. The visionary, the dreamer, the pathfinder, death. Alacrity I could see was simply a hero. She was brave and foolhardy and the best friend anybody could have.

As I watched her move so deftly between pines, I wondered whose hero she would become: mine or theirs?

It was the first time I’d realized that there would one day be sides drawn and a conflict ahead.

T
HAT NIGHT WE MADE
camp in a clearing of fallen pines. We set up two tents, one for Addy and the girls and one for Reggie and me. The moon was three-quarters full and the air was cold. I could hear Wanita and Alacrity laughing in the other tent while Reggie snored next to me. He was sleeping outside of his down bag, wearing only briefs. I could still feel the heat pouring off him from his exertions leading our journey.

Addy and I could see the change in the boy that day. Somehow the walk in the woods had made him into the man that he was destined to be. All along the walk he would turn to his sister and ask, “Do you remember this, Wanita? Do you remember when we were walking here before? It was the night that the light came, the night Luwanda died.”

The girl said nothing but kept close to her brother, touching him every now and then. When she tired he took her up in his arms and pressed forward with great concentration and force.

Reggie’s face became more angular, and his eyes lost their wandering and distracted air. It was as if he had been born to take this hike in these woods.

I loved those children. They seemed perfect together with Addy and me. Part of me, the part that was active and engaged, was only there for the children. But that night another part came alive. I was a link between natural enemies. I was the flotsam that Ordé preached about, but now I was partly aware, partly alive. I was spineless and mindless like a jellyfish, but still I had an instinct for survival. And survival, I knew, was the possibility of a bridge between these gods and my small race.

Maybe some pink crystal far away was dreaming of me, imagining the dignity of my partial awareness. The dignity of fungus stuck to a rock, depending upon the sun for life. At any moment we might be robbed of our single-note pleasure, procreation; a shadow could rise between us and the sun, could end our whole history. And even if that shadow never appeared, even if we did not meet annihilation, still, mindlessly, we would just multiply one on top of another until we covered the entire planet with our bones.