Blue Light (3 page)

“Did you see that, Addy?” Ordé asked sixteen seconds later.

The girl opened her eyes and sat up. She was naked and beautiful. Nineteen, with red hair and green eyes. Her eyes were small and too wide apart — which banned beauty queen contests from her life. But Ordé loved her. He’d loved her for almost a week now, and she hadn’t tired of his lies yet.

“Did you hear it?” Ordé asked.

“What’s wrong, honey?” She had never heard his voice without the strained notes of prophecy in it. Even when he made love, he talked in that Moses-giving-the-commandments kind of tone.

“We have to make love,” he said.

She reached out to hold him.

“No,” he said. “It has to, it has to — cook.”

“Huh?”

Ordé touched his eyes. “The word. It has to filter down. It has to bond so I can, so we can … come together.”

“We can do that now, honey,” Adelaide said.

She reached for him again, but he held her away.

“No. No.”

After a long while Ordé and Adelaide dressed and then climbed down from the water tower. Addy was a little scared of the beautiful man that she had tamed in the park. His sudden and solemn sanity, his unwillingness to lose himself in her perfect body made her think that it was time to leave.

She would have gone back to the dorms alone except that he took her to the small stream up above the tower and washed her. It was summer and the moon was three-quarters full. “The water was cold,” she told me years later in the woods of Treaty. “But he was so sure of every stroke against my skin.”

For once he didn’t say a word, just led her, undressed her, used her T-shirt as his rag. Somewhere between the moon shimmering in the water on her skin and the fading echoes of Moses, she forgot to leave Ordé.

On the walk through the trees and then onto Derby, toward Telegraph and her dormitory, Adelaide began to think of a life with a man who lied about everything and then, in turn, believed his own lies. Maybe that wasn’t so bad.

On the same walk Ordé saw great stone bodies, larger than the sun, floating in absolute darkness. These titans were dreaming, before the world, about Ordé and what he would say.

Adelaide lived with him for two weeks before they made love again. But when they did, the wild man’s love had become too much for her. It burned and rasped against her insides. He slept for three days after his clawing, screaming orgasm, stretched out right there on her small dormitory cot. When he came out of his hibernation she was gone, back home to Pomona and her family.

Hundreds of lights struck that night. Most of them collapsed into inert earth. Most insects, birds, and fish that witnessed the Radiance died immediately — not because the light was poisonous but because they were so close to death as a matter of everyday existence that, blinded for the moment, they fell prey to the world around them. Claudia’s dog, Max, survived the experience. A pregnant coyote in Tilden Park glimpsed blue wisdom and moved north. I know of only sixteen souls who survived the night — zygotes of the blue impregnation, children of the primal cell of life — but there may have been more.

While God’s tears fell I lay in a small candlelit storage closet in a place we called the People’s Warehouse, bleeding from both wrists. That was August 8, 1965. Still loaded on reds, I barely felt the blood that soaked through my jeans and spread across the floor. When Joseph Warren came in looking for paper towels, he slipped on the slick gore and fell on top of me. I saw him coming. I tried to say, “Watch it, Joe,” but the words wouldn’t form on my numb lips.

The impact of his weight didn’t hurt. All I felt was my bones shifting.
Sack of bones,
I thought. Just a numb sack of bones.

In Tilden Park the blue-risen coyote lifted her head toward the heavens and caught the foul scent of death, which she followed like some alien explorer who had just discovered the existence of evil. At the same time Reggie Brown held his mother’s head against his breast, feeling no loss at the death of his sister, and Eileen Martel identified Winch Fargo in his hospital bed. I was in the ambulance, then in my own hospital bed, under arrest for the crime of attempted suicide.

While I was recovering, Claudia Zimmerman’s husband shot himself in the head. The
San Francisco Chronicle
reported that he was despondent over his wife’s leaving him for life on a hippie commune somewhere.

In the days that followed I lost my job at the Berkeley library because I didn’t come in to work for two weeks. I was asked to leave the Ph.D. program in Ancient Studies because I failed to make any progress in my thesis on the Peloponnesian War. My girlfriend, Althea, went back down to LA for the weekend and never returned.

They let me stay at the People’s Warehouse in the Haight, though. They said it was because my blood had claim.

I spent the next few months wandering the streets of San Francisco and Berkeley. At any other time I might have looked like a maniac. A big black man in his twenties with a mane of matted and kinky hair. I carried a large homemade book, bound in unfinished oak and leather, that I wrote in while standing on street corners or sitting on the sidewalk. I was, at that time, writing a history that I’d given the temporary title
The History of Love.

It was a chronicle of the Bay Area at that time. Everyone back then felt the change in the air. It was the first time since the ancient city-states that a city was the center of change for the whole world. I was going to document that change. With eyewitness accounts, torn-out newspaper articles, lyrics from songs, and impressions of political speeches, I hoped to capture the sense of change from a citizen of the Haight. I attended rallies and love-ins as if I were part of the press. I experimented with a wider variety of the drugs I felt were changing the mind of the future. Instead of studying history in books, I was writing history about the real world.

That was during the day.

At night I’d curl up into a ball in my small corner and dream about my mother (her white skin somehow denying the love she claimed) and my father — his absence even blacker than me.

I’d get the night shakes. I’d wish that I were dead. It was on one such bad night that I had tried to kill myself. The head doctors told me it was the drugs that made me crazy — not my mother. They said that I was smart and that too much pressure in the Ph.D. program along with the downers and mushrooms had pushed me over the edge.

But they didn’t understand. They fit inside their clothes and behind their desks. They came from places where they were recognized as members and relatives and citizens. They were never stopped on their front lawns and arrested for stealing their own bicycles the way I had been. And when my mother came to the police station, she was turned away because I was too black to have come from her.

I spoke the white man’s language. I dreamed his dreams. But when I woke up, no one recognized me. No one but my mother, and I hated her for that.

All of this is why, Ordé said, I was open to the promise of blue light. My life was free from the identity
half-life
had made for itself. I was ready, the prophet said, to go further than man and his pathetic telos.

But I knew nothing of blue light as I wandered the streets scribbling and waiting for the right time to die. I had no idea that there would be a grander history for me to witness and document. I had no glimmer that I had a part to play in the future of life and in the ultimate demise of humanity.

The social worker assigned to my case was Dan Hurston. I saw him on Tuesdays on a bench at the entrance of Golden Gate Park. We met in the park because I couldn’t seem to breathe right in his office.

“How’s it going today?” he had asked me at our last meeting.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I mean, I don’t feel bad or anything.”

Dan had almost jet black skin, a shade or two darker than mine, and a thick mustache that reminded me of a bristle brush.

“What
do
you feel?” he asked.

I wanted to say that there was no difference between me and the air we breathed, that I was mostly dead, but instead I just shook my head.

“Have you been looking for a job?” His question seemed to be a rebuke.

“I’ve been walking around a lot,” I said.

“How about school? Have you tried to get yourself reinstated?”

Suddenly I was exhausted. I inhaled deeply but felt little satisfaction in my lungs.

“What are you going to do?” the social worker asked.

“You know, I keep thinking,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I keep thinking that it was my father’s blood on the bathroom floor. It was his blood. You know what I mean?”

Mr. Hurston shook his head at me. He looked at his watch. There were children playing on the small lawn behind our bench. I watched them scream and laugh. Their mothers were sitting on another bench, talking to each other and looking up to check on their babies now and then.

“What are you going to do?” Dan Hurston asked again.

“I’m gonna kill myself,” I said. “I’m going to go over to Berkeley and kill myself in the school library.”

For a few moments the social worker stared at me. I realized that I knew nothing about the man. He wore a thick gold wedding band. I was thinking that it had to be thick because his hands were so large and powerful. There were small scars on his knuckles and on the fist flats of his fingers. His eyes were dark and remote. He smiled only when he talked about football.

He stood up, expecting, I think, for me to stand also.

“Come with me, son,” he said.

I made no move.

He pressed his lips out and then sucked them back in. Maybe he thought he could force me to go.

“Listen, brother,” he said. “I can’t stop you. And it really doesn’t matter to me, or to the people down at Social Services, what happens to you. I’m going back to the office now to inform the police. So if you mean it, you better do it quick.”

I never saw Mr. Hurston again. Just one of those hundreds of people who walk into your life and then walk out again. Like my father.

I got on a bus headed for Berkeley, wondering if someone might lend me a gun.

O
RDÉ STOOD ATOP THE
flat stone in Garber Park — talking.

It had been four years since I’d cut my wrists. I still carried my woodbound book, but the title had changed to
The History of the Coming of Light
.

“You are but a base stock.” Ordé spoke in a commanding but intimate voice. It was drizzling on and off that day, so his audience was smaller than usual — fewer than eighty of his open-air congregation were there. Winos and unemployed clerks, dark-skinned nannies and their wealthy charges, the few blue novitiates (those who learned from the light but had not witnessed it), including me. And Miles Barber.

Miles was a homicide detective who dropped by about every other week or so. He usually came after the sermon. He didn’t seem to like hearing Ordé’s words.

Barber was investigating the deaths of Mary Klee, Carla MacIlvey, Janet Wong, and a man whom people in the park knew only as Bruce. They were all victims of a poisoner that the police had privately nicknamed Mack the Flask. They were also regulars at Ordé’s sermons, friends of mine. Among the first friends I’d ever known.

“You are but a base stock,” Ordé said again. “Vegetables cooked down in an earthen pot. Soup with only the slightest hint of flavor left. One after the other there is no difference in you. You live and die, come together and fall apart, you have children and give them empty names. You are barely there and fast dissipating; like the shit in a chamber pot spilled in the sea, you are flotsam having found your way to the edge of a decaying pier.”

Everyone stood close around Ordé’s stumplike rock. For all Ordé’s certainty, his voice was soft. His followers, acolytes, and devoted friends found that they had to push closely together to hear the words. Down in Berkeley, even in the city, they called us the Close Congregation.

We crowded together because the sermons he gave captivated us. There was something so true in his words that we clung to one another as if we were holding on to his voice. We were lulled and exalted because in some way the truth he told was him, not just some abstract idea.

“You’re way out from the heart of your origin, cut off from the bloodline that could provide the nutrients of true life. You are dying, unpollenated flowers.” Ordé looked around with a kindly expression. “Your death means nothing. Your lives are less important than spit on the sidewalk. I can’t even call you the seeds of something larger, better. You, who call yourselves living, are really nothing but the dead flakes of skin that some great shedding beast has left in his wake. The pattern of life is in you, but it is inert and decaying. …”

It seemed true to me. I felt lifeless; I felt inconsequential.

Just months after his bout with the blue light, Ordé had come upon me in the quad at Berkeley. He saw my sadness, named it, and told me that it was true.

“You are born dying and so are your children. And even though your leaders claim that you are making advances through the generations, you know in your heart that it isn’t true. You get better at making mechanical things, chemical things, but you can’t make better art. You can’t understand the real in even a stone. The stone exists, but if I were to ask you what it was, what it really was, you wouldn’t even understand the question. And if you did understand, you would pull out pencil and paper, microscope and atom smasher to try and answer. You would attempt in words to explain that it would be impossible to know the nature of being stone.”

A breeze kicked up just then. Ordé raised his head and smiled.

“You would be better off putting your finger to the wind, my friends. Lick your fingers, everybody,” he said.

Most of us did. One old woman named Selma licked all four fingers from top to bottom.

I still remember the first time I did this exercise for Ordé. I held up my hand and felt that most familiar and exquisite sensation. The air cooling my finger, drying it and moving on into the sky with the moisture of my life.