Blue Light

Prologue The Radiance

I didn’t use a tape recorder back then, but I remember every word. Our teacher stood on a simple flat rock and told us about the blue light. What it meant — at least, as much as we could understand. Here is what he said:

The prophet always seemed smaller, weak after his sermons. But we felt elated and strong.

There were other transformations on the night that Ordé, the prophet, saw blue light. These I have gleaned from conversations, newspaper articles, interviews, obituaries, and a peculiar facility that Ordé endowed upon me — the ability to read blood.

Reggie Brown was pushing the baby carriage down Easter Street toward the Broward shelter that evening. Their uncle Barnes was drunk again and Reggie’s mother was still at work, so he bundled up the twins, intending to take them to Nurse Edwards’s station until their mother came home. Nurse Edwards had Fly Comics in her drawer and Baby Ruth candy bars too. She’d been their father’s friend; she was at their house when the letter came from the State Department telling how Mr. Brown was missing in the police action in Vietnam. Now she helped Mrs. Brown with the children when she could.

Reggie stopped at a red light on the corner of Orchard and Easter. He peered inside the ragged double stroller to check on his two-and-a-half-year-old sisters. Brown girls, but not as dark as him, with fat faces that almost always smiled when he looked at them. Babies out of his momma like magic come to love them. Him and his mother, but not Uncle Barnes, not when he was drinking anyway.

“Hey, hey,” Reggie sang. Wanita giggled but Luwanda just stared. She saw it coming.

Reggie turned his head to see the flash of blue, and then he was walking again. Up a steep path in the woods. Beneath his feet was a stream filled with blue fish. The stream was shallow and the fish were big, but they had no problem swimming and diving. The sky was bright, but it was nighttime in his vision, night with no stars. Trees grew up the side of the valley, and the bright eyes of animals watched him move along. There were whispers. Terrible things. Gouts of blood, severed limbs in the mud. And beauty beyond Reggie’s poor words to say.

He traveled upward for days, it seemed. Blue smoke rose from his bare feet on the wet rocks.

A madman, who wore clothes fashioned from skins and bark decorated with bone and stone fasteners and buttons, was laughing at him. Beyond the man there was a valley. He could make out every detail — trees, leaves, and insects crawling in between. He could see single strands of spiderwebs waving lazily in the breeze. He could see the breeze too.

The trees were singing, some in a sweet alto and others in a bellowing bass.

Reggie started to run. It was a thousand miles away, but he knew that he could make it without ever stopping. He knew he could.

“Honey?” the woman said. “Honey, you okay?” It was an older brown lady with a Spanish lilt.

“Huh?” Reggie didn’t remember her. He didn’t remember standing there at Orchard and Easter.

The lady wasn’t tall but was very round. Her glasses were framed in metal. Her teeth were edged in gold. There were big silver hoops hanging from her ears. She smiled at him the way women smile at small children.

“Are these your little sisters?” she asked. She bent over to get a closer look under the tattered hood of the stroller.

Even before she started screaming, Reggie understood that Luwanda was dead. He didn’t know how he knew, but that didn’t matter. His sister had passed into blue. She was in that faraway valley.

Winch Fargo had watched them all afternoon. The old couple was selling lottery tickets at the outer edge of the church bazaar. The tickets were for a drawing to help out some kind of summer camp for needy children. Propped up on a little poster card in the center of the table was a picture of a smiling blond-haired boy who needed to get away for the summer.

Mrs. and Mr. Martel were having a great time greeting their fellow churchgoers at Palm Park in South San Francisco. They didn’t know that the long-haired, self-tattooed, and dangerous Winch Fargo had been watching them from behind a succession of beer bottles, hidden by the pink stucco maintenance hut, secreted between two shiny aluminum trash cans.

“If they stay till sunset,” Winch whispered, “then they’re mine.” The other tables began folding up at six-fifteen. The reading table. The events committee. Everybody waved, said good-bye. They offered to drive Philip and Eileen to the steering committee dinner. But the old couple was happy sitting in red nylon chairs, holding hands above the metal cashbox between them, watching the sun go down.

“... one hundred and forty-four dollars,” Eileen Martel was telling Philip. The last of the bazaar vendors were more than a hundred yards away, loading empty brownie pans, dirty dishes, and bags of trash into the back of the church van.

“And that’s just how much I wan’,” Fargo said.

Philip looked up with a smile on his face. The long blond hair on the man didn’t bother him. It was dirty and down past his shoulders, but that was the new style, the hippie look. And so was the scruffy facial hair; you couldn’t really call it a beard. Bad teeth, but rotting and discolored teeth weren’t a sin — not everybody had medical and dental insurance from Hogarth’s Encyclopedia and International Publishing after forty-five years without a sick day.

It was the pistol that took away Philip Martel’s second-to-last mortal smile. Pitted chrome that still managed a dull shine even in the last glow of twilight.

Eileen uttered, “Oh my,” and squeezed her husband’s hand, her best friend’s hand.

“I warned you,” Winch said.

“You what?” asked Philip.

“You was fool to stay out here until dark in the park.”

It rhymed, Eileen thought uselessly, maybe everything will be all right.

“The money,” Winch said. “That’s all I want. Give it.”

Philip could feel his hemorrhoid throbbing, but the pain meant nothing, nothing at all. He nodded and made to reach down, but as his head moved he caught a glimpse of blue glinting off the silvery barrel of the gun. Helpless, he turned his eyes upward. Eileen, always with him, did the same.

“What the fuck...” Winch saw the sagging, pasty-faced old couple smiling, actually smiling, when he had the gun. And then Winch peeked. He caught only the last second — not the full equation, only the echo.

He guffawed, “Whoa ho!” And a blue snake the size of a python slid in through his eye socket. His head felt as if it were bulging with thoughts murmured in a foreign tongue, whispering ideas that had texture, smell, and the broken music of God.

This last thought struck Winch as odd. He had never believed in God. Where did that come from? And where was the light?

The blue light had faded and left the twilight darker than the closet in Winch’s childhood apartment. Darkness so lonely that he would have done anything for light, that blue light.

He looked down and saw the old folks still sitting there — smiling.

Eileen saw her husband for the first time, it seemed. Philip Martel. Soldier. Father. Son. Lover under the covers but never so beautiful as now. A blue sheen still hanging over him like the afterglow of sex. She relived hot summer evenings, like that evening, after long days of her cooking and cleaning and his cutting the grass. After all that sweat a glass of beer... But that was the first time she had ever really seen him. His smile so sad that she knew, somehow, why and what he had to do.

“It was like we were in a bubble,” she told me at the prophet’s park many months later. “Like we felt everything the same.”

Philip felt most of the blue radiance in his chest. The gun hovered somewhere beyond his sight. Sad for all those years before the light, he felt a sudden awareness in a place so far away that it was impossible to imagine. But he was there. Not him, Philip, but them — blue radiant spawn. Somehow their memories merged, and he was transported so far away and long ago that he saw the birth of Earth in a pinwheel of self-knowledge. He felt the long journey of his cells through eons of evolution. Crawling, rutting, flying, dying again and again. There was memory in his blood, quickened by the light. But also there was a call to death that formed around the weakness in his heart. His mind became part of the light as the light prepared to join the magnetic energy that flowed through the ground under his feet.

He was dying. Dying in Eileen’s sad smile. Dying like the fading blue butterflies around his head.

As his heart began its final wild sprint back to blackness, he spread his arms with the strength of death and rose, knocking down the flimsy card table, to embrace his dirty half brother — the man from an eon ago with the gun.

“Whoa ho!” Winch cried out again. The light was gone, but the python still writhed in his head.

From the parking lot the Martels’ fellow parishioners began yelling.

Philip was already up, hugging Winch as though he was congratulating an old army buddy back from the trenches.

The muffled shot was not intentional. It was the volatile blue light that chose Philip’s fate, not the slug from Winch’s gun.

“Stop! Stop!” from the parking lot.

Eileen, quickly, was up and off behind the trees.

Blue radiance rose from Philip’s corpse on the ground. Winch knew somewhere that he was witnessing a miracle. The light hovered, seemed almost to hesitate, and then rose, a hundred thousand glittering pins. They hovered for a moment more and then dove into the ground beneath his feet like a frightened school of fish disappearing at the first hint of danger.

“No!” Winch yelled and then ran. The gun was in his hand, but his arms dangled awkwardly at his sides.

“He’s dead,” Winch said to no one. “Blue snake.”

Mrs. MacMartin, the social director, screamed and threw up her hands. Winch shot her, hoping for more blue light — but none came. Roger Pliner, Felicity Burns, Bright Williams, Chas Twill — all dead by Winch’s gun.

“Old lady!” he yelled. “Come on out! I don’t wan’ the money! I wan’ the light is all!”

The snake had swallowed his mind by the time the police came. Winch knelt amid the corpses in the parking lot. It wasn’t yet fully night when the flashlights hit him.

“Put down the gun!”

Winch held out the pistol in submission, thinking the voice was his mother’s. But the police mistook the gesture. He didn’t hear the shots. The first bullet took him in the right lung. Then one in the ankle as he rose up on one leg. In his right thigh, through his ear, in the left hand, the right shoulder, the lower intestine. Every wound a blue ember burning hot and bright. Winch Fargo smiled at the fires only he could see. They burned long after his mind closed down.

At her rented house in the Oakland Hills, in the backyard, Claudia Zimmerman was on top of Marcus. His eyes closed, a big grin on his loose lips. She moved up and down, wondering what it would be like to feel as good as he did. Her dog, Max, poked his nose into the cleft of Claudia’s buttocks. It tickled. On the back porch her husband, Billy, was with Marcus’s wife in the hot tub. She heard Franny yelping, Yes, yes, yes.

Grabbing Claudia by the wrist, Marcus groaned, “Oh, yeah.”

It hurt and she swayed back against his fast thrusts, aware of Max’s cold nose and lapping tongue against her rectum and of the blue light as she looked up in the sky.

Suddenly all she wanted was Marcus.

“Fuck it harder!” she yelled at the pudgy paper salesman. Max began to howl.

Claudia dug her nails into Marcus’s fat shoulders and he screamed. She hunkered down on him and ground his hips into the grass.

“Harder!” she yelled.

He called out again, not from pleasure.

Lights came on in the house up the hill.

She didn’t remember Billy and Franny coming down to see why Marcus was screaming. She didn’t remember Marcus hitting her in the chest and face with his fists in a vain attempt to push her off. All she knew was Max’s howling. His yowl a clear blue note deep in her body — a promise of rapture that the fool Marcus couldn’t even imagine. There were explosions in her mind every time she thrust down on him. There was the taste of blood as she tore off his right nipple with her teeth. And then weightlessness as Billy and Franny pulled her off Marcus, and then the cold water of the unheated swimming pool. Blue water and blue cold — Marcus’s spongy nipple between her back molars.

Horace LaFontaine lived for eight months and then died on the top floor of his sister’s house on Laramie in West Oakland. His sister, Elza, had taken him in when he’d come down with lung cancer. She fed him and shaved him, cut his toenails, and teased the hard feces out of his rectum when he was too weak to move his own bowels. She read to him late at night in words that he had once understood. Now the words were merely sounds, unrecognizable except for the timbre of his sister’s voice. That commanding voice he’d known as a youth in the black slums of Houston.

The only thing he’d known for a while was the feeling of falling out of the sky, like a lazy leaf butting up against gusts of air as it goes. The ground was his last stop, and falling was all that was left of his life.

Elza’s husband, Gregory, didn’t care about Horace. He was supposed to come up and see after his brother-in-law twice every night while Elza was off at work, but Gregory stayed downstairs drinking beer and watching the TV.

Horace didn’t mind. The sight of anyone moving made him dizzy. The sound of anything but his sister’s voice gave him frights.

He lay there, propped up on his pillows to keep the fluid in his lungs from drowning him. The oak outside the window was full of leaves. The sky above the highest limb was a dark blue.

Late afternoon. The thought blew through Horace’s mind, something he still knew between the cancer cells that crowded his brain. When the sun goes down, he remembered, when the night comes and all the pretty girls put perfume on they necks and thighs. He thought of bees then and the stinging pain. He smiled because there soon wouldn’t be any pain for him to fear.

A drum was beating and he wondered if what Jimmie T had said in Attica were true; was Africa in him? Was this drum some long, long ago memory in the back of his mind? Would he awake on some vast savanna where the first men walked and made life?

But the beating was just the fast tempo of his heart, the rhythm of life pumping quickly in his veins, trying to outrun death one last time — the final act of a wasted life.

He felt the falling again. The cascading leaf now slicing the air with a downward dip. Then there came a racing toward the ground. A quick downdraft, and suddenly Horace was dead — his eyes still open but no longer seeing the tree in the window.

Human time stopped in the tiny room. The clock lost its meaning but still checked off the moments that once might have been. Horace was gone.

And then that quick shaft of blue light — a commuter minutes too late for his train — shone its full radiance into the dead stare.

Horace was gone, but the urgency of the blue light on the cells still living in his eyes coursed through his body like a seismic eruption. Life leaping from one dead synapse to another, demanding one last act. The deep breath of the corpse and his lurching leap from the bed caused a racket.

Gregory jumped out of his TV chair down below and hurried up the stairs.

The corpse that was Horace dragged itself to the lamp on the table across from his bed. He ripped the cord from the pink ceramic vase and shoved the bare wire into his mouth.

Fat Gregory took three steps with his first stride. Three hundred pounds dragging on his heart as he went.

Electricity combined with the equations of light and played through every cell in the dead man’s body. The cancer withered, and the cool resolve of life engaged the lungs and bones and breath of this once-man. His skinny, naked body pocked with sores. His hair matted, eyes yellow. His forgotten cock just a lump of sagging skin.

Gregory made it to Horace’s door but had to stop to catch his breath. He looked at the door and listened. All he could hear was the theme song of The Wild Wild West from the television two floors below. Night was close at hand, and Gregory felt a twinge of fear. He decided to go back downstairs. He decided to let Elza come home and find her brother dead in there. Gregory was sure that Horace was dead. If he wasn’t dead before he fell, then the fall must have killed him.

But if Elza found him on the floor and he was cold then she would blame him. And what kind of woman could he find if she left him? He was fat and unemployed. All it would take was a quick look and then a call to the hospital.

Gregory opened the door.

The blue glare hovered over the zombie in an electric arc. Yellow eyes glowed from the brown skull as black lips sucked on the lamp cord.

Horace looked up, moving the cord to the side of his mouth like it was the stem of a water pipe.

“Run, Gregory,” the corpse said in a voice that was like Horace but, then again, was not.

“What you say, Horace LaFontaine?”

“Run, Gregory. Run now. Enjoy your last days as a man on this rock. Run.”

Gregory took a step toward his brother-in-law. He wasn’t afraid, not really afraid. The man had just gone crazy with the disease. Gregory reached out to take the wire from Horace’s lips, and the blue/electric shock hit him. All three hundred pounds of unemployed dockworker went flying backward, through the doorway and down the top flight of stairs.

Gregory kept going. He ran down Laramie Street. Not running really; he was walking hard with all the force of a run in his heart. He kept up his fast pumping walk until the police stopped him, a fat man in boxer shorts screaming down the streets of Oakland. There was an article about it in that week’s Oakland Standard, a throwaway paper. An unidentified man was detained after being stopped on the street in his BVDs raving about a zombie. He died in police custody from a heart attack, the coroner’s report said.

When Elza got home that night neither man was in the house. She called the hospital, but no ambulance had been dispatched for Horace. She called the police, but they didn’t identify Gregory until late the next day.

William T. Portman, burned out on hallucinogens and homeless, was living in the park at that time. Philosophy school dropout and compulsive liar, he had changed his name to Ordé and took to begging and living off young women who were temporarily fooled by his lies and handsome blond features.

Ordé had a lean-to made from a tarp in the bushes behind a large water tower. There was a woman with him then. He usually had a woman with him, until she got tired of his talk. This one’s name was Adelaide.

It was late in the afternoon and Adelaide was sunbathing with Ordé atop the wooden tower. She had fallen asleep, but Ordé didn’t know it.

“I can see,” he was saying, “a great wrong across the city. It’s like a fog, only deadly. But not smog. Not something... something scientific—” And then the blue light came into his eyes. He knew at once that it wasn’t one of the wild hallucinogenic flashbacks. His body didn’t melt, the history of his life wasn’t written on the ground beneath his feet. It was his true nature repeated a trillion times. It was the whole history of something that he didn’t understand — not yet.

“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.