Blue Light

One

Ordé 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.

I was desperate back then.

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” Ordé asked.

Many nodded.

“It’s like the cold kiss of a spirit beyond your ability to see. You can feel her only for a brief moment and then she’s off.”

We nodded some more.

“You are lost,” Ordé said.

He stepped off his rock, walked into the crowd, cleaving the congregation, and went up into the trees. Feldman and Alexander, two of Ordé’s larger acolytes, blocked the way to anybody who wanted to follow him. He would be gone for the rest of the day. He’d probably go down to San Francisco, in the secondhand brown suit I’d bought him, to look for a woman.

It was time to look for a mate again.

Many of the Close Congregation followed him up to the point of the large carob trees into which he disappeared. They pressed up against the large bodyguards and called out, “Ordé! Teacher!”

I didn’t go running after him.

I had been with Ordé for nearly four years by then. I’d left everything behind me and joined the Close Congregation. Ordé and his words were my only connection left to life. The day we met I’d intended to kill myself. I’d been with him ever since. I knew he’d be back. I was one of the few who knew where he lived in town. I collected donations from the Close Congregation, kept his bank accounts, and paid his bills.

Ordé had a lot of money in the bank, the large donations he collected himself in private interviews, but he spent very little of it. I controlled the checkbook, but all I craved was his truth.

Ordé’s words were the truth. You could see every image, feel every sensation he described. His metaphors (what we thought were metaphors) took on a palpable reality that hung in our nostrils, stuck in the back of our throats. Halfway through any sermon I would notice that I was no longer listening to his words but instead experiencing the phenomena he described.

“Hello, Chance,” Miles Barber said.

He had come up behind me while everyone else drifted after Ordé.

“Detective Barber.”

“Where’s your boss gone?” the policeman asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t check in with me every time he splits.”

“He go off like that often?”

“You know as well as I do,” I said. “You come up here enough.”

“He always go alone?” Detective Barber asked.

“We’re never alone, Officer.”

Barber’s hair was thick and black, but his eyes were light gray. He wasn’t tall and he always wore an odd-colored suit. That day it was an iridescent gray-green two-piece suit with a single-button jacket.

He looked and sounded as if his entire life were just off the secondhand rack.

“I don’t care about your blue light bullshit, kid. I wanna know if your boss disappears with people from this group into the woods.”

“You asked me that before,” I said.

“I can arrest you anytime I want, kid.”

“Yes, you can, Officer.”

Barber took me in with his eyes. I had known many policemen. Ever since I was a child they’d been rousting me. I knew when a cop hated me — my big frame, my black skin. But Barber didn’t have time for that kind of hatred. He had a job to do, that was all.

I would have liked to help him. But I could not.

I couldn’t, because helping him would have condemned the dream. Barber was a cop, that’s all. He found out who did wrong, uncovered the evidence to prove it, and sent the wrongdoers to jail. He wasn’t concerned with the subtleties of truth and necessity. He couldn’t see above the small laws that he worked for.

I wondered, as he interrogated me for the fifth time, if he knew how close he stood to his precious truth. Did he know that three and a half years earlier I had been summoned from my Shattuck Avenue dive by Ordé?

A man, I forget his name, who lived two floors below knocked on my door a little after 11:00 P.M.

“Phone,” he said. Before I could get the door open he was already going back down the stairs.

There was a pay phone on the second floor that we all used to receive calls. I was surprised because no one ever called me. My mother never even knew the number.

“Chance?”

“Teacher?” I asked. I had never seen Ordé away from the park except for that first time we met. It had been only a short while since I’d been a member of the Close Congregation.

“Come to me,” he said and then he gave me the address.

I was flattered by the call. I didn’t ask why or if it could wait till morning. I just told him that it might take a while because I had no car or bike or money for the bus.

“Hurry” was his reply.

I found myself running down the nighttime streets of Berkeley.

Ordé lived in a small house about six blocks down from Telegraph. There was no path through the uncut lawn to his door. I could feel the wet blades of grass against the bare sides of my sandaled feet.

He opened the door before I reached it.

“Come in.”

The small entrance area had a doorway on either side. The room to the left was empty and dark except for a single flickering flame that I thought must have been a candle. The room to the right had an electric light burning behind a half-closed door. I turned toward the brighter light.

“No,” Ordé commanded. He gestured toward the flickering dark.

I obeyed him not because I felt I had to. I wanted to please him because when he spoke he seemed to understand all the pain of my life. He never blamed or made empty promises; he simply explained and left me to make my own choices.

We sat on the floor in the dark room on either side of a fat candle. He wore black slacks and a loose collarless shirt that was unbuttoned. The light played shadows on his shallow chest and gaunt face. His blond hair was in shadow, making his bronzed skin seem pale.

“You are half of a thing,” he said, speaking softly and with no particular emphasis. But I felt the words wrap tightly around my mind. “The lower half,” he continued. “The tripod, the foundation, the land below the stars.”

I wanted to get up and run. Not to escape, but to work off the elation I felt upon receiving his words.

“You are sleep before waking, like I was before blue light. I look upon you as you would see a man who used his head to hammer nails. Poor fool.”

The image was so clear in my mind, I worried that it might be a flashback to an old acid trip.

“Do you understand?” Ordé asked.

“I think so.”

“What?”

“The blue light is God,” I said.

“No. I don’t think so,” Ordé said with a little wonder in his voice. “No. Not God, but life. Not lies or hopes or dreams. Nothing that is to come later, but right now. Right now. Here.”

I had never experienced anything like sitting there receiving his words. The only thing even approaching it was an early memory I had of my mother’s trying to show me the San Bernardino mountain range. I was three or four, and she held me in one arm while pointing off into the distance. All I could make out was “far away” and colors. But as she kept explaining and pointing, I slowly made out the mountains she described. The elation I felt at realizing mountains for the first time was a weak emotion compared with what Ordé made me feel there in the darkness.

I’d heard him speak many times before, but it never had that kind of impact. It was as if I were transformed temporarily and for a brief moment I saw through his eyes, shared his expanded awareness.

“Do you understand?” Ordé asked again.

I nodded.

“Can you see what I’m saying?”

“It’s like the whole world,” I said meaninglessly. “Everything.”

“Everything must change,” he said, making sense out of my nonsense. “But in order for that to happen we must multiply. We must grow until every animal and fish, every rock and drop of water is one. Everything must merge.”

“Like an explosion?”

“Yes. But slowly. Over thousands of years. But it will never be unless we can mate.”

“Why can’t you?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I try,” he said. “But my blood is too strong. It devours the egg.”

My eyes had adjusted to the darkness by then. There was a wooden bench behind Ordé and a pile of clothes or rags on the floor.

He stood up and walked toward the door with the electric light shining behind it. I followed him into the light.

It was a small dinette separated from the kitchen by a waist-high wall of shelves. A large table, topped with red linoleum, dominated the room, but it was the small corpse slumped back in one of the chrome chairs that captured my attention. It was Mary Klee, one of the Close Congregation. Head thrown back, dark foam down her chin. One eye was wide-open while the other was mostly closed. She wore jeans and a T-shirt.

There was a bowl half filled with what looked like congealed blood on the table before her. I’m sure I would have been sick if I wasn’t still stunned by the power of Ordé’s words.

“I hoped that if we shared blood, her cells might have been strengthened.” There was no apology in Ordé’s voice. “But even just to drink some of it, she died.”

He stood for a long time then, pondering, I suppose, the future of his race — the generation of blue divinity. I sat down across from Mary, looking into her cockeyed stare. I’d never seen a corpse before, but then again, I’d never believed in God before Ordé told me that there was something higher than God.

The silence continued for half an hour or more.

“Can you drive a car?” he asked finally.

I must have nodded.

“Put her in the car in the backyard and take her somewhere,” he said.

There was a junkyard in Alameda I knew. No one patrolled it at night and there were no fences. All the way out I wondered why I obeyed him.

“It’s only words,” I said out loud. “Only words, but Mary’s really dead.”

But I knew the answer. Those words had transformed me, made me believe in something that I could be a part of. Ordé didn’t mourn Mary. How could he? People were, at best, coma victims in his eyes. He hadn’t murdered her; he had tried to elevate her life.

Detective Barber interrupted my thoughts.

“I know you think that he’s your friend, kid,” he said. “But you knew those people too. If you think he cares more about you than them, you’re wrong. MacIlvey was his girlfriend and she’s dead.”

“We’re all dead, Officer,” I said. “Some of us just don’t know it yet.”

Barber shook his head at me. He was a good guy. At that moment I wanted to be like him. I wanted to forget the sad truth of Ordé’s prophecies.

Two

Phyllis Yamauchi was an astronomer working at Berkeley when the shaft of blue light came in through her laboratory window. A year later she heard about a fanatic who claimed that knives of blue cut through heaven to enlighten us. She came the following Wednesday. I had no special senses then, but I could tell that the meeting between Ordé and Phyllis Yamauchi was monumental.

The tall blond fanatic came down from his rock and took Phyllis in his arms. She was crying and he made sounds and faces that expressed no emotion that I knew.

Ordé picked up Phyllis, hoisting her with one arm as if she were a child and said, “God is not alone on this earth.”

At first there was silence among us. Then I started to clap. After that the applause came, applause and cheers.

It was Ordé’s power to see the past as it moved toward the future and to rouse the hearts of men with this knowledge.

But others had seen the blue light also. Gijon Diaz, a man who loved puzzles. Reggie and Wanita Brown. Eileen Martel, who brought home dozens of wounded animals, all of whom recovered even from the worst injuries. And there was Myrtle Forché, who was a playwright before blue light and a monologist after. They, and others, showed up at Ordé’s Wednesday sermons. They didn’t all come to every sermon, but there was a loose association that kept most of them coming back from time to time.

They were the Blues. Men and women who had transcended the human race. Part of their mind had lived among stars so far away that our science hadn’t even imagined them.

That I moved among them, shared smiles and drank from the same cups, elated me. I believed that I was privy to a pantheon of gods. Though only children in the first months after their creation, they heralded an evolution that would become the divinity their mortal lower halves had always dreamed of.

Doctor Edward Marie at the Alameda County Jail infirmary didn’t expect Winch Fargo to survive his wounds. But while Ordé made his prophecies, Winch’s wounds slowly healed. After seventeen months on a hospital cot Winch opened his eyes to confusion and his mind to pain. He asked for painkillers, but Doctor Marie saw no reason to comply. The wounds were mostly healed. Edward Marie couldn’t see into the half-life that infested Fargo’s mind and body, the fragment of that divine equation that flitted through him like a curse from some long-forgotten victim.

Fargo had to be chained in the courtroom because he would exhibit violent spasms now and again. His defense attorneys said that he had a degenerative nerve disorder. Doctor Marie disagreed. The prosecutor dismissed the jumping agony as a ploy by the defendant to save himself from the maximum sentence.

Winch didn’t care. The chains he wore were in his blood. Pain chains. Somewhere far, or near, or not at all, in his head. When the feelings converged he’d jump up, or at least try to, and scream.

Maybe the jury would have set him free. Maybe they would have sent him to a psychiatric ward, where drugs could have soothed his anticipation of eternity.

They might have except for Eileen Martel; she and the boy, Reggie, and the little girl, Wanita. They had already been to Ordé’s rock.

That’s how I know the tale.

Eileen had only recently found the Close Congregation when one day Reggie and Wanita were in the park with their mother. Wanita went right to Eileen and crawled into her lap.

Eileen made friends with the children’s mother. She said that she’d lost her husband on the same day that Mrs. Brown’s daughter Luwanda had died. She gave the family money and offered to baby-sit when Mrs. Brown needed time to work.

They were often seen at the Close Congregation — chalk white Eileen and her young brown charges. The older woman also traveled in the company of dogs wearing homemade casts, flightless birds, and all sorts of wounded wild animals that became tame in her presence. A broken leg or wing, yellowy oozing eye, or bloody gash all healed under Eileen’s care. Reggie’s mother told me that Reggie had gone wild after his sister died; he’d go out the window at night and sleep all day under his bed. He wouldn’t listen to her or even talk until Eileen met him in the park.

“It was like magic, Chance,” Mrs. Brown told me. “That old white lady stroked his forehead with her fingers, and just like that, he was my boy again. That white lady come straight from heaven.”

Ordé wanted to adopt the children, but Eileen told him no. She said that she would oversee the children’s well-being. It was the only time I saw Ordé back down to someone else’s will.

Winch felt them as soon as they came into the courtroom. For him it was a flood of light. The Blues told me that they all could feel the presence of others like themselves. Ordé called it a tinkling. Reggie said that it sounded like a roar.

“Whoa ho!” Winch shouted when he became aware of Eileen and her charges. He leaped for her, but the chains and guards stopped him.

“Please!” he cried loudly.

Eileen was there every day after that. She had come as a witness for the prosecution but returned out of charity. Winch would nod to her at the beginning of every day and then sit back peacefully.

Ordé said that Winch was soothed by the aura of someone who had imbibed the whole light. When Eileen and Reggie explained that they felt something like a jagged tear inside them when they came near Winch Fargo, Ordé knew, or said he knew, that Winch hadn’t seen enough of the light, that the presence of someone whole eased his pain.

“The composition of light is something like the schematic structure of a computer tape,” Phyllis Yamauchi explained to me one Wednesday before Ordé’s talk in the park. “Do you know anything about computers?”

I did not and said so. I was eager to hear whatever she had to say. I had already begun the History of the Coming of Light and wanted to hear about the blue light from someone other than Ordé. I wanted to be sure that my head wasn’t just fried from taking too many drugs and then brainwashed by the rantings of a fanatic.

“Every computer tape has a header,” Phyllis explained, “then unique information, and finally a trailer. The header gives you information on what you are about to receive. You read the unique information in light of what preceded on the header. The trailer, on a computer tape, controls routing, count information, and other statistics gathered while processing the unique data. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it does.”

It was a joy to talk to Phyllis. She was so calm, and calming, compared with Ordé. She was sane but still believed in the blue light.

“Blue light, as I see it, is similar to the computer tape in many ways,” she said. “Only the header is repeated along the body of unique data. This header tells of our history, starting with an ancient planet and the origins of life in the universe—”

“But how did it tell you?” I asked. I felt completely comfortable interrupting her. “Didn’t you have to learn the language first?”

“The language of light is in our blood, Chance,” she said, smiling. “Once illuminated, we are fully aware. The middle part — our mission, our individual purpose — is most of the light, almost twelve light-seconds in length. This information is what makes us different from one another. But even if every light were exactly the same, it would become different because the information in living blood alters each one of us also.”

“So you mean if you and I saw the same light, we would get different information?” I asked, willing myself not to pick up my pencil and woodbound notebook.

Phyllis Yamauchi smiled and blinked, then she put her warm fingers on my writing hand.

“Even the way you think is based on the possibility of your blood, Chance.” While she waited for that truth to settle in, I noticed the Goodyear blimp floating in the sky behind her head. I thought that that flying machine would be as forgotten as some billion-year-old single-celled creature after blue light exerted its will.

“The last piece, the trailer,” Phyllis continued, “is the seat of power. It releases the potential in us. For the first time in the history of this world, life evolves without dying. Ordé thinks that this Winch Fargo person saw only the last piece, the trailer. He has all of our power and sight with no understanding or purpose. That’s what drives him mad.”

She was wearing a green blouse with white pants that had green stains at the knees because of the lawn we knelt upon. Her skin was the color of pale honey, and her frame was small and fragile. To some passing stranger she might have been a coed talking to some way-out hippie that intrigued her.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Know what?”

“How do you know about the light? Is it because you’re a scientist?”

“I am the light,” she said.

“Didn’t God say that?” I asked.

Phyllis smiled at me. I had touched her somehow.

“On Earth,” she said, looking deeply into my eyes, “there is science in one place and God in another. In the church or temple or synagogue there is God up above and humanity down below, forever separate. But in truth, the universe is like a vast ocean teeming with life. All of that life is related. Science and God and man all meet there and find that each of us is one becoming the other.”

She came with me to my room that night and we made love. She seemed to like me, but in the morning she said that there was no possibility for me to make her pregnant. We were never together again, but I still cared for her.

Eileen’s calming presence allowed the jury to sentence Fargo to 135 years. He was craning his neck, smiling at Eileen, while the foreman of the jury delivered the verdict.

Eileen took the bus out to Represa every week. He was always haggard and weak when she arrived. But after fifteen minutes, even through bulletproof glass, he revived. He told her that it was like being taken up by the wind to see her, that always the night after he saw her he was visited by gods who told him all kinds of secrets. The gods would come for two more nights, and then he would sleep on the fourth.

But for the rest of the week monsters would come to drink his blood. He had cuts and scars along his arms, Eileen could see that. But she didn’t know what they meant.

The week after my fifth grilling by Miles Barber, Claudia Heart showed up. She was the last of the Blues to come to us. I didn’t know her real name, Zimmerman, at the time. But her real name didn’t matter, because she went by the name Heart and lived by that principle.

She was welcomed by Ordé on the first day she appeared. Like most of the Blues, she didn’t seem special at first. Five five with limp brown hair and smallish brown eyes. Her skin was neither pale nor dark. Her teeth were small. I felt the beginning of an erection coming on when I first saw her, but I figured that it came from my excitement at Ordé’s recognizing her as another of the Blues.

Ordé himself was overwhelmed because Claudia’s dog, he claimed, was also shot through with the first words. This was the first animal he’d seen that had been elevated above man.

Claudia accepted Ordé’s embraces and the accolades of the congregation. Then she stood quietly next to me and listened to the sermon.

She was quiet but intent.

While Ordé lectured on the qualities of light, Claudia was seducing me.

I felt her shoulder nudging my arm but didn’t think much of it at first. We were, after all, the Close Congregation. Even when she pressed up against me and put a finger through one of my belt loops, I thought she was just being friendly.

But then she pulled my T-shirt out at the back of my pants. Her hand found its way to the small of my back and down to the top of my buttocks. That hand was incredibly hot.

“... the light of creation is the salvation, and also the damnation, of man,” Ordé was saying. “It is the idea and the power of something beyond your notion of God. But that does not mean free will is abandoned. A scientist touched by the light will become a superscientist. That child will plumb the meaning of the universe. A craftsman...”

As Claudia’s fingernail scratched a circle at the small of my back, I felt that the breeze blowing over me was actually her breath. I caught a glance at her. She was staring at Ordé, but her smile was for me.

“... a craftsman will be Vulcan by earthly standards. He will make miracles with wood and stone. But not everyone who is of light can be trusted...”

Claudia chose that moment to shove her hand down to caress my buttocks, one finger cleaving its way through to my rectum. There were people standing behind us, and I am no exhibitionist, but I wouldn’t have moved her hand for anything. Not even for Ordé.

“... everyone that has received the light has a purpose in the divine plan but you cannot trust us all. What if a murderer looks up from his victim, into blue? A child molester, a thief, a liar, a con man? There is room for every kind of man or woman.” Ordé glanced in my direction then. I wanted to moan for him to forgive me and for the teasing pleasure of Claudia’s finger. But Ordé wasn’t looking at me. His gaze lowered to Claudia’s dog, Max. “Even a dog can ascend to the heights...”

I’m a tall man. Six three and a little bit more. That’s why Claudia didn’t have to slouch much to get her hands down between my legs. She squeezed the hard vein below my scrotum. I could have closed my legs hard enough to stop her; I wanted to, but I couldn’t.

It was as if I were a teenager again, a boy who had always wanted and never known the touch of sex.

“... we are not here to answer your prayers,” Ordé was saying. “We are here to prepare the firmament for the unification of all things. We are here to create a newer and higher order. Each of us will use the tools we have. Each of us will do what is necessary. Your desires are meaningless. We only love you if it meets our needs—”

“Come on,” Claudia whispered to me. “Let’s go.”

She had to stand on her tiptoes and let go of my vein. I was listening closely to Ordé because that was his power. When he spoke prophecy we were enthralled. That’s how I knew that sex, or passion, or love, or whatever you want to call it, was Claudia Heart’s province.

No matter how much I wanted to stay and listen, I had to go with her, my erection tenting the loose work pants I wore.

She led me through the Close Congregation and down a path through the trees. We came to a small dirt road, and she stopped to kiss me.

Everything dimmed, like when lightning strikes and the electricity goes low. I could hardly see or breathe. Where our lips met became the center of a new being, that’s the only way to describe it. The kiss — not the flesh, but the act of kissing itself — became the origin of something beyond me but that I was still a part of. My arms moved to embrace her but too late, she moved back and studied my eyes. Whatever it is she saw must have satisfied her, because she smiled and said, “Come on.”

I didn’t understand how she could bear to disengage or how she could move so quickly. The kiss seemed to go on forever, but why I couldn’t get my arms around her I did not know.

We went a little ways from the park and into the street. She led me up a nameless alley, behind a machine shop. There we came to a Dodge van that was wedged between two small buildings.

She opened the back door. The carpeted back of the van was completely bare except for a canvas cot that stood against the far side.

“Get in quick,” she said.

The dog, Max, ran in with me.

“Take off the clothes,” she said.

She pulled off her one-piece black dress. Underneath she had well-formed small breasts and a flat stomach. Her pubic hair was plentiful and wild, like an untamed shrub. I moaned when I saw her and tore a fingernail on the knot of my bootlace.

When I had most of my clothes off she looked at me and smiled. My erection was pointing right at her.

“What do you want?” I asked. I knew that I couldn’t move without her telling me to.

I was hunched down because the van wasn’t big enough even for her to stand up straight.

She pulled the cot toward the center of the space.

“Here,” she said, indicating that I should sit on the edge toward the bottom.

I was naked except for one boot and the pant leg I couldn’t get over it.

She made me lie down and then she got herself astride my erection. I felt something so firm and warm and embracing that I gasped.

“Don’t move,” she said.

“But I have to.”

“Does it feel good like this?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Don’t move.”

I was looking up into her eyes. She seemed to be asking for something, and I was trying my best to give it to her. Every now and then I’d have a spasm and a shake.

“Don’t move” would be her response.

After a long time she began to move up and down slowly, leaning over a little so she could run her fingertips over my nipples. I tried to move with her, but she dug her nails into my chest and whispered, “Stop. If you feel like moving, just call out, just scream. Nobody’s gonna hear you. Scream.”

She started to move faster then.

I let out a yell.

The dog barked.

“Just lie there, Chance,” Claudia Heart said. I wondered where she’d learned my name.

I screamed.

“How does it feel?” she asked.

“Like cashmere and steel,” I said. I don’t know where I found the voice or the words.

“Do you like it?”

I couldn’t answer.

The dog let out a howl that echoed inside my chest and brain.

“Spread your legs,” Claudia commanded.

I heard her but somehow I didn’t think she was talking to me.

“Spread your legs,” she said again.

I did so and instantly felt the dog’s hot tongue lapping against my testicles. I tried to pull my knees together, but Claudia put her hand out to stop me.

“If you try it, Max’ll snap those balls right off.”

Scared as I was, I just got more excited.

“Just take it, baby,” Claudia said. And she began to move fast, moving me around like rock and roll.

When I came I thought my heart would explode. Claudia let her serious gaze break for a momentary smile.

“It’s just the beginning, Chance. It’s just the start.”

I tried to get up, but Max bit my thigh. He howled again; Claudia brought back the cashmere and steel. It was hours before she was through with me. I don’t know how long it was exactly because I wasn’t conscious the entire time.

After our lovemaking I slept and dreamed.

My father was there, tall and black like he’d been in the photograph Mom kept. He was wearing a suit in the dream, not the jeans and work shirt.

“Hey, Lester,” he said. Lester was my given name. Ordé named me Chance through prophecy and divination. He said that the name stood for the slender thread of hope that humanity had for survival in the face of creation.

“Yeah, hey,” I said to my old man.

“You still my son, boy. You still a black son to Africa too. Don’t let them white folks get you down. They ain’t no kinda problem less you let ’em be.”

“But Mom’s okay, right, Dad?” I asked.

“She’s fine, fine. But just don’t let her deny me in your veins. Don’t let her tell you that you just the same. You’re better than anybody could imagine.”

I was sitting on a tiny island with Claudia. She asked me where we were, and I told her that it was my island. The island where I went to get away.

I was looking for that island when I left home to go to the University of California at Berkeley. Before that I lived in Los Angeles with my mom. She sent me to church and school and summer camp with all white kids. She told me not to listen when they made fun of me and to just ignore it when they played tricks on me. They never beat on me, because I was too big. But they could hurt my feelings anyway.

I told Mom that I’d be strong, but I couldn’t be, and when I left I never went back to her or her life.

I started out in the dorms until I got my B.A., but when I entered graduate school I moved to a big warehouse in San Francisco shared by drug addicts, runaways, students, and dropouts. I kept up my studies for a year or so. I dropped acid and learned the recorder. I’d hitchhike up along the Russian River with girls I’d just met that afternoon. With the hippies I found some peace, but it was a hard peace. I felt guilty because of my mother, and so it was always difficult to sleep.

“Wake up. Wake up.” Claudia was shaking me. She had her dress on again. Max was asleep in a corner of the van. “Get up.”

“Hi,” I said. My pants were still inside out, hanging from my left ankle and boot.

“Go on now, Chance.”

“What?”

“Go. Go home.”

“Can’t I go in the morning?”

“No. I need to be alone now.”

“But—”

“We’ve done whatever it was you needed, Chance. It’s time for you to go.”

There was no arguing with her. I pulled on my clothes. She went to the driver’s seat of the van and waited while I dressed. When I was finished I tried to say good-bye but she didn’t seem to hear me.

I reached out to touch her, but Max growled and leaped to his feet.

Three

I found Ordé waiting for me when I got back to his speaking stone. It was already dark.

“You left my sermon,” he said. It was neither a question nor an accusation.

“She made me.”

“I know,” he said. “I was trying to hold on to you with my words, but her sex was too strong.”

“I knew it,” I said. It felt like an unfaithful lover’s confession.

“How do you feel?”

“Like I could fly but don’t remember how.”

“And what do you want now?”

I looked him in the eye. We were the same height. Where he was thin and golden, I was strong and the color of milk chocolate. There wasn’t much of my white mother in me.

I shrugged and held back a sob. Ever since I’d left Claudia’s van I wanted back in. Back into her presence. She was the only thought my mind could hold on to. Everything else was dissolving. All my memories and desires were fading like temporary images glimpsed in the contours of a cloud.

“Would you like to hear the rest of my sermon?” Ordé asked.

I still knew how to nod on my own.

He went right into his talk just as if it were still noon.

“You are neither worm nor butterfly,” Ordé said, “but only the dry husk left after the metamorphosis. If you die, it is of no consequence. Your life is only the blind bumbling of an abandoned newborn. Your pleasure is salt and sand. Your heat is tepid tea. Your life a short gust across stagnant water—”

The words came over me like a cool balm, a restorative love. The condemnation didn’t bother me. He was my teacher standing on a philosopher’s stone. His brutal words were only truth.

“—water that cannot flow. True life is in my veins. It is in my eyes and words. There are only two ways to become of the light. Either you see the true words or you are born of the blood of truth. You can never ascend. You have only the slight possibility of half knowledge. You may perceive that there is a truth beyond you, but you will never know it, you will never glide between the stars on webs of unity.”

Not only was there truth in his words, but somehow his words themselves were true. Like Claudia’s kiss, Ordé’s words brought me visions of a place between things. A space that is smaller than an atom but that still encompasses everything in existence. A place that is not yet here but that is coming.

“Do you want to see it, Chance?”

“Huh?”

“Will you risk your worthless life for an inkling of the truth?” His voice was kind and concerned.

There was no choice. He was a god and I, a blind mole.

We went down toward his small house. He wore a brightly colored tie-dyed monk’s cloak and habit, but nobody looked twice. This was the Bay Area in 1969 and a black man, a brother, walking with a white man who wore his hair like a woman didn’t turn heads.

In the light you could see that his home was made up of four small rooms with bare floors that were scarcely furnished. We went into the kitchen. I sat down at the table, remembering Mary sitting there dead. I wondered if my other friends had died at that table. While I wondered, he switched on a glaring electric light and put a white ceramic bowl in front of me. I noticed dark remnants splattered on the floor and walls. When I looked up, Ordé was approaching me with a sharp cork-hafted knife.

“If I speak to a crowd, they listen because they suspect the truth in my words,” he was saying. “One day I’ll run for office.”

I stared at the knife as he stood over me.

“But if I connect with the truth in words while talking to a small group, or just one person, the truth is known. I am the doorway to truth, Chance.”

“Are you going to kill me?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The others died, but you’re different. You’re... you’re weaker than they were. You’re one of the susceptible ones. More than anyone, you hear us. You hear the music.”

He handed the knife to me. “Cut a vein and cover the bottom of the bowl to about an inch or so.”

I didn’t want to die and I was sure that what he was going to do would kill me. But I couldn’t refuse him. Death was better by far than his disappointment. I cut my wrist and the blood flowed freely. The feeling of the blood trickling down between my fingers was familiar, almost comforting. It was a sensation I associated with power — my power.

The warm dollops plopped quickly into the white bowl. I tried to stop the bleeding with my thumb, but the blood kept coming. I tried three fingers, but still it came between and around. I was beginning to panic when Ordé took my wrist and placed a large gauze pad over the cut. He pressed hard for about a minute and then produced bandage tape and wound it tightly about the gauze. A large circle of blood grew on the bandage but stopped before reaching the edges.

Then Ordé took the knife. He raised his sleeve, showing his wrist. There were many scars there along the vein. I wondered if each incision meant a death.

Ordé chose a spot between scars. He dug in the point and made a quick twist with his wrist. The blood came out in quick droplets, mixing with mine. Ordé’s blood was darker, but mine was heavier. At first the droplets formed little pools across the top like dark islets in a crimson sea. But as he bled more, the islets came together to form continents.

When he was finished Ordé simply pressed his thumb against the small incision for ten seconds or so. The bleeding stopped completely, and I wondered if that had to do with his truth also.

“We have to wait for the mixture to prepare itself,” Ordé said.

He sat across from me and smiled.

I remembered the first time I sat in his presence on the afternoon I’d decided to die the second time.

“How’s it goin’, brother?” he asked me.

“Fine.”

“You at the school?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What you do there?”

“I study Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War and its impact on the idea of history. That’s the general idea anyway...” I stopped myself from going on to explain that the general and medical observer and historian not only told history but was himself a part of that history; he was history. That was my thesis, simple and elegant, I believed. But no one in Ancient Studies had thought my idea was scholarly enough, and they were happy to see me gone.

“You like that?”

“It doesn’t seem to matter. Maybe it did a long time ago, but not now.”

“All you learn around here is how to mix up the slop,” Ordé said.

“You got that right.” That was the first time I felt Ordé’s truth telling, but I didn’t know it then.

“You know the water tower above the statue back up in Garber Park?”

“Yeah?”

“I get together with some people there at noon on Wednesdays. You’d learn a lot more up there than you ever will in a classroom.”

“About what?” I asked.

Ordé turned to me then and looked in my eyes. “About everything you miss every day. About a whole world that these fools down here don’t even know exists.”

Back then I thought it was his eyes that convinced me to live at least until the following Wednesday.

Sitting there in his kitchen, as we stared at each other over a bowl of our blood, I wondered at how far I had drifted from my pristine studies.

“See,” Ordé said. “The blood mixes itself.”

He was right. The darker blood and the lighter had formed into longish clumps like fat worms. They twisted and turned against each other, sometimes slowly, sometimes fast. Every now and then two worms would collapse and fall together and then fall apart — another color completely now, almost white.

“When they’re all the same color it will be ready,” Ordé said.

I watched the spinning worms, thinking that this was the first time I could see Ordé’s truth outside of my mind. It wasn’t just Ordé’s words or Claudia’s lovemaking that dazzled me. This was proof.

My stomach began to tighten. The back of my neck trembled, and I wanted to jump up from that table. I wanted to run.

“You see,” Ordé said. “They’re all that milky pink color.”

“Yeah,” I barked.

Ordé went to a drawer in the built-in cabinets around the sink. He pulled out a small whisk and came back. The pink worms were writhing violently by then.

Ordé plunged the whisk in and mixed briskly. The worms turned back to liquid. It was as if the writhing were an illusion, a vision brought on by Ordé’s suggestion.

“This is the lightest color I’ve ever seen,” Ordé said.

“You mean like with Mary?” I asked.

“She was the first,” he said. “That’s what killed her and Janet Wong and Bruce too. They drank a darker fluid and died.”

Ordé looked me in the eye.

I raised the bowl to my lips. The thick fluid was warm on my tongue. In my throat it seemed to change back into worms. Sinuous and twisting they went down. I tried to take the blood from my lips, but Ordé put out his hand to increase the tilt of the bowl. I drank it all down. And then threw the bowl to the floor.

Inside me the worms were on the march. Through my stomach to my intestines. Under my skin and into my heart. I screamed louder than I had for Claudia. When I jumped up Ordé tried to grab me, but I hit him and he went down. I ran to the front door and out into the street; then I took off. Every now and then the parasites in my body brought on a spasm, and I’d fall tumbling across lawns and from sidewalks into the street. A car bumped into me on Telegraph, but I kept on running.

The visions started a few blocks after the accident. Wide bands of light in which images and histories unfolded. Molecules the size of galaxies, strange-looking creatures moving in and out of multicolored lights. A flat plain appeared on one curving screen of blue. The plain, as my mind entered it, spread out in all directions. No path to follow or mountain to set my sights on...

“What’s wrong with him, Martinez?”

“He’s trippin’, Sarge. Trippin’ hard.”

They must have been policemen. They must have arrested me. I know they did because I woke up in the drunk tank of the Berkeley jailhouse. But I was distracted by the visions and the sounds too. I imagined stars singing in a chorus; it was no mistake, no happenstance. There was meaning and the deft motions of a dance among the suns. It was then I realized that the worms had bored their way into my brain.

A pane of light opened before me. It shone like a parchment burning with alien inscriptions, equations, and hieroglyphs. I stared at the burning pages as they moved past. I took in each character but understood very little. Toward the end was the full biography of Ordé. His childhood as a liar and his adult life as a saint. I saw and felt everything he had known and done up until the moment of blue light.

There was a flash and then I was, myself, a page.

A blank sheet.

An unwritten footnote.

Four

“Lester?”

I opened my eyes to see a tall white man dressed in a white smock that hung open to reveal a red-and-yellow-plaid shirt and blue jeans.

“Yeah.”

“I’m Dr. Colby. How do you feel?”

“Where am I?”

“At Santa Teresa rest home.”

“I’m tired,” I said.

At some other time (it could have been later that day or another week) I awoke to find Colby standing over my bed again. He was thin. The whites of his eyes were laced with red veins, veins that seemed to be writhing.

“How do you feel?” he asked again.

“I don’t know. Everything looks funny.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Like your skin. If I look at it hard, I can see all kinds of blues and yellows that are like the negative of a photograph.”

“Do you feel nausea? Headache?”

“Why?”

“Do you have any history of blood disease?”

“No.”

“Any problems?” He was trying to sound nonchalant.

“Am I sick?”

“There seems to be something wrong with your blood. Not wrong really, but odd. It’s not acting like we expect it to.”

“So what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.” The doctor ran his hand over his short salt-and-pepper hair. “We’ve sent it out for tests.”

He took my blood pressure and peered into my eyes, throat, and ears. While he examined me, I learned that I had been in the sanitarium for three and a half months.

“A fellow named Portman had you brought here,” the doctor told me. “He calls every week to see how you’re doing.”

“I’d like to talk to him the next time he calls,” I said.

“When you’re strong enough to walk.” Colby gave me a friendly smile. “We don’t have phones in the rooms.”

He gave me a dark green pill and left the room after he’d made sure that I swallowed it. I fell near to sleep, into a kind of half-dreaming, pensive state.

I was aware of new possibilities in life. Like an amoebic cell drifting in the ocean, dreaming of becoming a whale. Like a bag of cement waiting to become a part of a highway or bridge. There was anticipation in every sound and sensation.

Light flittered across my eyelids. A wooden flute played softly.

Ordé was sitting next to my bed, wearing that secondhand brown suit. He’d added an almost shapeless gray fedora to the ensemble — long blond hair flowed out from under the back brim. He smiled. It was a pleasant smile, a smile that a parent has for another man’s child. But I could no longer have the innocent love I once felt for the prophet. I was a worker now. An adult meant for lifting and toting, building and protecting.

“I’m sorry I have to wake you up, Chance. It’s almost Christmas and we have to get on with our work.” Ordé smiled again and I sat up.

I was still weak, though, and fell back into the pillows of my sanitarium bed.

“You have to get back your strength, cousin. You’ll need a few weeks to eat and exercise. Then you’ll be ready to come back and teach us how to do the blood ritual right.”

I wanted to speak but passed out instead.

When I woke up again it was night and I was alone.

The room I was in was large with a high domed ceiling. There was a big white door that must’ve led to some hallway, and then there were double glass doors, covered in white lace, that went outside.

The moon was shining through the curtains. I forced myself to stand up and walk to the glass doors. I didn’t feel strong enough to pull them open, but I moved the curtains to the side and gazed up at the moon. I can’t express the joy that I felt looking up, being filled with light. Even the comparatively sterile light of the moon is filled with wonderful truths. With my heightened senses, I could actually feel the light against my skin. The tactile sensation caused slight frictions along my nerves. It was like the diminishing strain of a classical composition that had gotten so soft a breeze could have erased it.

The music spoke of that spinning celestial body and of the sun’s heat. There was a long-ago cry of free-forming gases and a yearning for silence. The universe, I knew then, was alive. Alive but still awakening. And that awakening was occurring inside my mind. I was a conduit. We were all conduits. With my mind I could reach out to the radiance that embraced me.

But I didn’t understand. I wasn’t blessed by light. The potion Ordé gave me opened my senses but gave me precious little knowledge. I was like the tinfoil put on a jury-rigged coat-hanger antenna — merely a convenience, an afterthought with few ideas of my own.

The universe spoke to me in a language that was beyond my comprehension. But even to hear the words, just to feel them, filled me with a sense of being so large that I couldn’t imagine containing any more.

Then there came a yipping like pinching at the back of my neck. I put my hand back there but found nothing. I saw a dark blur outside the window. Two night eyes, four, six, eight.

The coyotes came slowly toward the window. I wasn’t afraid. They exuded a music like the moon did, but theirs was a quartet of fast drums and a thrumming of blood.

From behind them came a larger coyote. This one, when she came into the light that carpeted the lawn, showed herself to be one-eyed. The young canines moved to their mother as she stared up at me.

I opened the doors and they all rushed in, jumping around me. In my weakened state I fell to the floor. The young coyotes pushed their forepaws against me and yipped. They nuzzled their wet snouts against my face and rubbed their bony ribs against me. They smelled of things wild and feral, but I wasn’t afraid. I felt them the same way I could feel the moon. It was as if I had been a fifth cub with them in the den where they were born, as if I had run with them and suckled on my own special teat. I felt the yip in my throat and a growl too.

That’s when Coyote stood before me. The cubs moved away and I looked at their mother. She whined, wanting to tell me something, I was sure. But I didn’t understand. She pawed the pine floor and licked my bare feet to no avail.

At that moment the door to the hallway opened. All six faces in the room turned toward the light. A small Asian woman stood there. She threw her hands up above her head and tried to turn and run at the same time; instead, she fell to the floor, screaming.

I felt a searing pain between my left shoulder and my neck. I turned to see five coyote tails moving fast across the moonlit lawn. The nurse was hollering for all she was worth. A deep dread settled in on me and I lost consciousness again.

I was unconscious for five days. The rabies shots they administered weakened me so much that the doctors thought I might die. But Ordé said that he was never worried about that.

“You’re a blue blood now,” he told me. “Pale but still blue enough.”

In two more weeks I was strong enough to leave Santa Teresa’s. My body was strong, but my mind was full of dread.

“They were like Claudia’s friend, the dog? You’re sure?” Ordé asked on the bus back to Berkeley.

“I could... could, like, hear them, you know?”

“You mean, you felt it like that?” Ordé said rubbing the thumb and forefinger of both hands lightly together.

Somehow the gesture made sense, and I nodded.

“And so when she bit you, she was trying to communicate,” Ordé said. “She was telling you something.”

It was a truth waiting to come to me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Ever since she bit me I’ve been just about ready to cry. I mean real sad crying too. Like my best friend just died in my arms.”

Ordé touched the wounds on my shoulder. I turned to give him a better view of the injury and found myself looking out the bus window at the large white stones that led down to the ocean. The Pacific was singing a sonorous dirge. It was a great moving beast with flecks of life glimmering within its folds.

It was hard to control my new powers of perception. Everything I saw — grass growing, breezes darting through leafy boughs, maggots swimming in death — everything set my senses to translating. That’s what Ordé called it. Reading the meaning of myself in the world and, therefore, he claimed, changing the world.

Ordé had already explained in one of his sermons that the purpose of light was to combine with the DNA molecule, to unite matter and energy into a perfect state of thought and being. The blue god, who has the only ability to know, was in me. His brilliant eyes and keen ears making and remaking the world in my particular perceptions.

I felt a sharp pain in my neck. I yanked my head around to see my teacher digging his fingernails into the half-healed wounds inflicted by Coyote. There was sympathy in his powerful gaze, sympathy and command. The blood felt as if it were mobilizing in my veins. The cells felt particular, like tiny soldiers marching toward the breech. I was shaking. Ordé touched the reopened wound with his other hand. He then brought the bloody fingers to his lips. Shock registered in his eyes, and the grip on my shoulder and neck eased.

As the pressure lessened, the despair I had felt dissipated. I was exhausted and slumped forward, putting my elbows on my knees. When I sat up I noticed a small black boy sitting across the aisle from me. He was looking fearfully at my wounded neck.

Ordé had his face buried in his hands by then. The forgotten blood on his fingers smeared the top of his forehead.

He cried all the way back to Berkeley, red drying to black across his forehead.

When we returned from Santa Teresa, Ordé went straight home. He locked himself in his house and didn’t come out, as far as I knew, for days.

That was Friday.

On Wednesday he didn’t show up for his sermon to the Close Congregation. The congregation was there, although smaller.

Phyllis Yamauchi was already missing. She hadn’t been seen for more than two weeks, but no one in the Close Congregation was worried. It wasn’t required that Blues report to anyone. Phyllis studied her charts and telescopes and every once in a while came by to let Ordé see what she theorized. Often his prophecy complemented her studies. I had been transcribing their notes into my book.

Claudia Heart had taken more than fifty of Ordé’s followers to her own communal residence, not far from the People’s Warehouse, in Haight-Ashbury. She would take them one by one, men and women, into her van and make love to them just as she had done with me. Most came crawling back, begging to be with her, swearing to do anything for her kiss and company.

I would have gone on my knees to her without the blood ritual. Now I felt no desire for her.

I got a ride from Feldman, Ordé’s bodyguard, and went down to our teacher’s house. He came to the door but didn’t open up.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Chance, teacher.”

“Go away.”

“The congregation is waiting for you.”

“Tell them to go home. Tell them to go home and to say their prayers.”

“What’s wrong, teacher?”

“Go away, Lester.”

Up until that moment, no matter how hard or frustrating life had become, I still had faith in Ordé and his Blues. I believed in the unity, perfection, and grace of the universe. I believed in what Ordé called the grand hierarchy. I was a brick in the cathedral of existence meant to support the feet of gods.

My confidence was bruised when I heard the fear in Ordé’s voice, but I knew my job. I went back up to the congregation and told them that Ordé had been faced with a great mystery. I told them about the coyotes who performed their own kind of blood ritual on me, how our teacher tasted their knowledge in my blood.

I didn’t tell them of my blood ritual with Ordé. I didn’t trust that everyone would understand the purity of his motives.

It was a new experience for me. I had never spoken to a crowd before. But with my new powers of perception, I could read the needs of the assembly.

“You want to know something?” I asked one young acolyte.

“How did you manage to keep from going with Claudia Heart?”

“Ordé sang to me,” I said.

“Will he sing to me?” There were tears in her eyes. Later I found out that her husband had tied her up when she tried to follow Claudia, that he’d drugged her for two weeks until her desire to run had changed to a deep sadness at the loss of love.

“Yes,” I said.

I answered questions and soothed the nervous congregation. They accepted me as Ordé’s substitute, at least for one meeting. I didn’t have his power. I could perceive but could not project. What I had to offer them was passive understanding.

Five

After the Wednesday meeting I went back to Ordé’s house, but he wouldn’t even answer the door. His windows were blocked by sheets of tinfoil, and junk mail was already spilling out of the small mailbox.

I went home after that.

Ordé had paid the rent while I was in the sanitarium.

My one-room studio cost seventeen dollars a week, which I usually got in the mail from my mother even though I never answered the letters she enclosed with the checks.

Actually, I never even read those letters.

I was thinking about that on Sunday night. How I cut off my mother, and all the rest of my life. How I blamed her for bearing a black child and rearing him in a white world.

It seemed silly to be worried about race then. I had come just a few steps from something beyond race or species or life, even. Not only would I have met the maker in the coming of blue light, I would have seen myself in his radiance.

But now I was back in the mundane world. My teacher, who had been like a god to me, had become just a frightened man.

I wondered again how long it would be before I killed myself. I plugged in my radio and picked up a blues station on FM. Robert Johnson wailed that the blue light was his blues while the red one was his mind. As I fell asleep, his blues mingled with mine.

I felt a clicking around my ears and imagined that small insects were making last-minute plans before they prepared to climb into my brain. I woke up suddenly, slapping all around my head. The knock came right after that.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Reggie.”

“What do you want, Reggie? It’s late.” The windup alarm clock on the floor next to my mattress said 3:16.

“Open up, Chance, we got a problem.”

I was still a member of the Close Congregation. Reggie was still one of the Blues. Even if he was only thirteen, I had to at least talk to him.

I got to my feet and opened the door. Reggie was short for his age. Five two. He had a flattop haircut and wore jeans and a buttoned-up white dress shirt with the tails out.

We just stood there because I had no chairs.

“You got to come with me, Chance.”

“What’s goin’ on?”

“Just come on, man.”

Even in Berkeley the streets were more or less empty at that time of morning. There were a few hippies around. A few drug deals going down. But on the whole, there was no one. We went down Shattuck to Cedar and over to La Loma; from there we got to Buena Vista, Phyllis’s street. The block was lined with two- and three-story brick houses that had deep lawns and big, dark trees.

We came to one house and Reggie walked up on the lawn. He went to a redwood gate at the side and unhooked a metal latch. When he turned around he saw that I was still at the sidewalk.

“Come on.”

“Come on where?”

“Come on!” Reggie shouted in an intense whisper.

We went through the gate and down the side of the house. The pathway there was yellowish cement that almost glowed in the darkness. A cold breeze met us, and I had to duck my head to make it under the low hanging branches.

At the back of the house there was a door in the ground. It was an ornate portal to the basement that had thick opaque glass panes in it. One of the panes had been broken. Reggie lifted up the door and latched it to the house. Then he stood back.

“What?” I asked the boy.

“You go on. I want you to see what’s down there.”

I didn’t need any special powers of perception to hear the fear in Reggie’s voice.

I descended into the darkness of the basement. I couldn’t see a thing.

“There’s a door right in front of you,” Reggie called down at me. “Open it up. The light’s on the right side on the wall.”

I walked straight ahead until my toes kicked wood, about five steps. Then I fumbled around for the knob. The moment the door was open I smelled it. A sickly sweet odor that was cloying, like a baseball field piled high with rotting lilies.

I snapped on the light and then fell to my knees, vomiting.

Her corpse had been decapitated and then split open from pelvis to throat. Her ribs had been broken outward, and the flesh of her arms and legs had been torn open. The hands looked as if they had been lacerated by claws.

Only the bottoms of her feet were left untouched.

The head had been tossed in the corner. I was drawn to it. She was facing upward, but there was not much of a face. The maniac had destroyed her features and then discarded her.

“It’s Phyllis,” Reggie said.

His unexpected voice gave me such a fright that I jumped away and yelped.

“What’s wrong with you, Reggie?”

Ignoring my shock, he said, “I came looking for her. Nobody’d seen her in a while, and I just thought I’d look for her.”

Reggie’s abilities, though still immature, were finding things and hiding. Ordé wanted to call him Scout, but Reggie liked his own name.

“I came looking for her,” he said again.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the remains of Phyllis Yamauchi. Her organs were spread out around the body on the dirty concrete floor. The dried blood had flowed out more or less evenly and made a kind of dark frame for the horrible sculpture.

The body was a grisly enough sight, but it was the intent behind the murder that hit me so hard. The killer not only hated her, Phyllis, but also hated her flesh and bones and blood. He’d stripped away every vestige of humanity, leaving only a tattered lump of meat.

I looked up at the ceiling, trying to blot the sight from my mind. All along the unpainted beams hung a chorus of pale spiders. Silent, spinning, waiting. They were unconcerned with the tableau on the floor. These spiders I used as beacons of sanity. Death was less to them than a spring breeze, certainly nothing compared to a frothy, juicy moth.

“What should we do?” Reggie asked me.

I had forgotten he was there.

“Can you tell what happened by tasting her blood, like Ordé?”

Reggie looked at me with big, frightened eyes.

“Well, can you?”

“Once Wanita cut her finger and I kissed it,” Reggie said.

“Yeah?”

“And I saw a big ship leaving the harbor. She saw that ship the day before with my mother, but I wasn’t there.”

“So you can read blood,” I concluded.

Reggie looked at the body and shook his head no. I understood. He might have been a god, but he was still only a boy.

I searched the basement until I found a washer and dryer in a small room. I took a sheet from a basket in there and tore it into two cloths — one larger and one smaller. Then I went back to Phyllis’s body. Deep inside her chest cavity was still moist. I soaked up some of the blood in the smaller rag and then wrapped it in the larger one.

A couple of blocks away Reggie asked, “Should we call the cops?”

“Uh-uh, no, I don’t think so, kid. The police would just start looking for some maniac. They’d never believe what Phyllis was. They’d probably blame us. What we should do is go to Ordé and ask him what he thinks happened.”

We walked on a ways. The sun was coming up, and even though I had the blood of a murdered woman in my pocket, I was struck by the dawn’s beauty. The wisps of black clouds made a grid over the orange light. There was an ancient hue to the light, something that had once known greatness. I could feel my heart and mind open up to the scrutiny of light. I felt the connection between the blood in my veins and the furnace above. I looked down after a while, seeing the afterimage of Sol in the sidewalk and passing lawns. I had walked off the sidewalk and into the street. My visions distracted me so much that I almost walked into the path of an oncoming car.

“Why’d you come to me, Reggie?” I asked the boy, partly to get the answer and partly because I wanted to concentrate on the world around me.

“Huh?”

“Why’d you come to me? You could have gone to Eileen or even Ordé.”

“Eileen would have been too scared, and I don’t know where Ordé lives. Anyway, I don’t like Ordé too much. He so weird, always tryin’ to make everything sound so big when it’s all just normal.”

“But you could have found Ordé if you wanted, and you know we’re gonna have to go to him anyway.”

“That’s okay,” Reggie answered. “It’s okay if I go with you.”

We got to Ordé’s place a little bit before six. No one answered the front door, so we went around the back and knocked there. When he didn’t come out I took up the metal lid of a trash can and started banging.

That got his attention.

“I told you to go away, Chance,” he shouted through the closed door. “Take Scout and get as far away as you can. Run.”

“Phyllis Yamauchi was murdered,” I said. “I have some of her blood.”

As I said it, I realized that this was the first death of a Blue other than those that died on the first night that light fell. Reggie’s sister had died and so had Eileen’s husband. Ordé claimed that even they had not truly died. He said that their energy, along with who they had become, had separated from the body to carry their life force into the energy fields of Earth. But that was during the coming of the light. All the Blues that had lived were healthy, never sick, and somehow had the appearance of agelessness. Even Eileen Martel looked as though she could walk all day. Reggie and Wanita had grown some, but they were kids.

While I was thinking about gods and death, the door opened. Ordé stood there in an untied terry cloth bathrobe. He was naked underneath, and Reggie stole glances at the man’s penis like any boy would.

Ordé hadn’t shaved, bathed, or even pushed his hair out of his face.

“Come on,” he said.

His once sparse kitchen was now crowded. There were boxes of powdered milk and dried soup on the counter and a large-caliber rifle and a clip-loading pistol on the table. Under the table were boxes of ammunition.

“You going to war, teacher?” I asked, stunned at my own brazen humor.

Ordé sat at the table and held out his hand.

“Give it to me,” he said.

I took the rags from my pocket and began to unwrap the larger from the smaller. Ordé was impatient, though, and took them from me. He shook the tattered sheet around until the blood packet fell to the floor. He got down on his knees and pushed the whole thing in his mouth.

He hiccupped once and then slumped down into unconsciousness.

Reggie and I tried to wake him, but it couldn’t be done. I pulled the rag from his mouth and made sure that he was breathing. Then the boy and I dragged him to the cot in his bedroom.

He was unconscious for nineteen hours. Reggie went home to his mother and Wanita (they had taken up residence with Eileen Martel in San Francisco), but he came back at about six that evening.

At one the next morning Ordé gasped and scrambled to his feet.

“Oh, my God!” he yelled, maybe with some kind of relief, and then ran to the bathroom.

Reggie was sound asleep on the floor when the prophet awoke, but he was right behind me chasing Ordé to the toilet.

We found our teacher studying his face in the mirror, running his fingertips around his cheeks and eyes. He was crying and laughing.

“What is it, teacher?” I asked.

Ordé turned to me, grabbed me by my shoulders, and asked, “Do you see me?”

I nodded. He looked over at Reggie, and the boy nodded too.

“I made it back. I fought him off. I’m still alive.”

Ordé went to the toilet bowl and urinated with no shame. He turned to us halfway through and said, “We have a lot to do. A lot to do.”

Reggie and I went out to Ordé’s living room. His couch was a long and backless wooden bench, and his chair was a piano stool. I turned on the light and then went to sit next to Reggie on the bench. There was a glistening effect to the light because of the aluminum foil Ordé had used to block out the windows.

He came in after a few more minutes, dressed in jeans with his chest still bare, his long hair at least combed, and with a look of determination and fear in his eyes.

“Thanks, Chance. You too, Scout. I was so scared after Coyote’s warning that I couldn’t do anything. But now I have survived.” Ordé brought his hands together right between his eyes so that his fingers pointed up toward his forehead.

“Coyote’s message? That’s what you got out of my blood?” I asked.

“We are no longer mechanical pieces of flesh, Chance. Not just a heart to pump blood or a brain to translate primitive signals. Our blood and bone and flesh sing out the whole world that might be.”

I wasn’t in the mood for a sermon right then. I wanted answers but I knew that Ordé wasn’t so easily pinned down.

“If I feel something,” he continued, “or perceive something, if I learn something in any way — that knowledge is everywhere in me. I am more than a part of the whole; I am potentially everything. That’s why I can taste what has happened in blood.”

“So who killed Phyllis?” Reggie asked.

That’s when Ordé told us the story of what he called Gray Man; how Horace LaFontaine died of cancer but was then resurrected in blue light. How he went out in the desert and hibernated in a cave for almost four years.

“He is Death,” Ordé said. “And Death seeks its own.”

“He wants to kill us?” Reggie asked.

Ordé nodded. Then he said, “It was written in Phyllis’s blood because she fought Gray Man, she made him bleed that thick lifeless blood of his. She knew his story before she died.”

Ordé took a small folding knife from his pocket and pricked the tip of his right forefinger. A tiny drop of red appeared from the cut. He held the finger out to me.

“Taste this and see what I’ve seen.”

“Died?” I asked.

“Yes,” Ordé replied. “It was true death. His hands ended her body’s life, and his essence extinguished her light.”

Six

I was unconscious before I knew I was falling. After tasting that salty drop of blood, I was in another place. Many of Ordé’s memories became my own, including the story of Gray Man.

On the night that blue light struck, the corpse that had once been Horace LaFontaine staggered, skinny as a rail and barely dressed, up into the hills. He walked through fences and over large stones, pushed down small trees when they stood in his way. His bones crackled from the electricity he’d sucked out of the wall of his once-sister’s home.

The human thoughts in his mind, all the memories of the life of the man who once bore a name, were now like specimens in glass jars in a great laboratory of death.

As he made his way through dense foliage, blood-hungry night insects came at him. But before any of them could alight, cold blue electricity ignited them in the air.

He made his way like that, false fireflies dying around him as he went, perverted blue light inside and out. Walking death seeking its own company. Unbridled potential with no life to temper it.

He went north dimly aware of a coyote that stalked him. Her nose close to the ground. Her quick feet ready to run. He couldn’t catch her, but then again, if she came within rock-throwing distance, she would die. Both were aware of the limits of their power. The coyote had witnessed blue light that night also. Now she smelled the unnatural odors that fumed around Horace LaFontaine. She tracked him as a scientist might follow the path of a celestial body that has, for no known reason, altered its course.

She sniffed the air and then licked the ground he walked on. All her senses cried out. She yipped and howled, but her warnings about Gray Man went unheard.

Three days later, far up a slope that was the beginning of a long meandering decline into the northern desert, Gray Man found his cave. In some cubicle of Horace’s mind he had gleaned the story of another man who died and came back to life. The man was buried in an underground chamber, behind a great boulder.

There was a stone above the cave. Gray Man climbed in, digging into the earth under the stone with hardened nails. From far off, the coyote watched, remembering the placement of the stars and the trees and the smell of the ground.

After many hours, almost in daylight, the boulder fell, sealing the dead man in.

Coyote spent the day circling, coming closer. She was skittish, frightened even by small breezes that rustled in the dead grass. It wasn’t until twilight that she made it to the rockbound cave. She sniffed and studied, whimpered and barked.

When she reached the upper part of the blocking stone, she pawed the dry dirt a little and stared hard, as if maybe she could peer beneath.

The dead hand shot out of the ground faster than she could see. The long-nailed finger destroyed the right eye and curled upward to rip out the bones of her head. But she was too quick to be killed. Half blinded but still alive, crying loudly at the pain and darkness, she ran at full speed back into the hills.

And then Gray Man rested. He leaned back against the cave wall in a corpse’s recline. One arm thrown carelessly beneath him, one leg at an almost impossible angle. He would lie like this for years, pondering the corpse he inhabited.

He traveled up and down the corridors of remembrance, witnessing the earliest sights forgotten by Horace: his mother bathing with him and his sister in the old iron tub in the row house in the Third Ward, a spider crawling down the banister on his first real bed, the smell of urine in the alley down at the end of the block. He remembered every word in every language that Horace had ever heard. English, Spanish, French, German, and Japanese. He remembered the numbers and their relations, as much as was taught up to the seventh grade, when Horace dropped out of school. He extended the roads of Horace’s knowledge until the path of mathematics converged with the fear-laden knowledge of the big bomb. He plumbed the meaning of philosophy by comparing words that lay dormant and ununderstood. He studied crime and then ethics. He learned of prayer and of God. He learned of Satan and knew somehow that this was his deity on this planet.

Gray Man hated life.

Horace had not been a good man. As a soldier he’d killed in Europe and later in prison. He knew about God (the blue light in life’s eyes) but didn’t seem to care. He stole and once, in a drunken stupor, had raped a woman who he knew and lusted after.

Horace was dead but he could be recalled. He could be an ally. He would understand all those millions of word sounds and word strings repeated over and over, never meaning the same thing or sometimes meaning nothing or sometimes meaning feeling. The pinch that is good. The smile that is bad.

The joke.

What Gray Man hated most were questions asked that needed no answer and phrases repeated again and again with no purpose or resolution. There was only one answer, only one resolution — and they were both death.

Horace had understood what Gray Man needed to know.

Horace was dead, of course. He was gone when Gray Man came, but the pieces of him were still there. Like in the movie of the man named Frankenstein and the monster with the same name.

A nose, a brain.

He could be rebuilt like the old Chevrolet he once owned. The engine could take you all the way to Las Vegas and back, baby.

A dying man yells at the end of his life.

He sees the clawed hand of the Reaper reaching for his belly. Razorlike talons cut him open; blood and guts spill out like mud.

A dying man yells from a hillside grave after the end of his life.

A one-eyed coyote looks up from her four pups and sniffs the air. The coyote pups all look too. They stop their suckling and whimper from a pain they felt before birth.

Horace comes awake in the desert. The gravelly ground under him feels wonderful. The stab of small sharp stones against his cheek and ribs are things to laugh about, feelings to celebrate. He looks up and sees a moon that is ten times larger than it has ever been. Next to this moon floats a shimmering cloud of incandescent blue gas. A bright red stone, the size of the old moon, orbits the cloud crazily, like an erratic electron.

He stands up and sees that his hands are very large. But as he watches them, they shrink back to normal size.

“It’s hard to keep things in place,” another Horace says.

Horace looks up and sees himself approach out of nowhere.

“This thing you call desire is a powerful tool. It’s easy to let it get carried away.”

“Who the fuck’re you s’posed t’be?” the real Horace asks.

Gray Man, in the form of his host, in the chambers of imagination, raises an eyebrow, and the true Horace — the dead Horace — feels the skin being ripped from his body.

His scream fills Gray Man’s lips in the hillside crypt.

“I am your master,” Gray Man says. “Grey Redstar. Recently from elsewhere.”

Horace falls to the ground and rolls around until his slick-blooded body is plastered with small stones. He screams again as the second skin covers his body — a skin of pain. Then he lies still, arms and legs jutting straight out, teeth chattering.

Gray Man shrugs and Horace is standing in front of him, skin covering his flesh again. The evening breeze feels cool, but Horace no longer trusts sensation.

“I request your help, Horace LaFontaine.”

“Who’re you? Where am I?”

“Everything you see is mine,” says the dead man. “It once was yours but you never knew it.”

Horace understands these words more clearly than he has ever understood anything. He starts to wail. The cry echoes throughout the mindscape desert.

Three years later Gray Man stirred in his grave. Coyote heard the cadaver’s sigh. The half-blind mother skimmed the outer edges of his tomb with four perpetually half-grown pups sniffing at her heels. Gray Man exerted his untiring strength against the great rock, and after a few days it began to give.

He was free to follow his light, which is the darkest of dark blues.

He retraced his steps, stopping now and then to break into isolated desert homes. There he sucked electricity from the walls and found money and clothes to fit him. In one house he murdered a small child who had been allowed to stay home because he was sick that day. Gray Man didn’t care about humans much, but he needed to see how they died, how they clung to life, because he knew that the Blues would be similar but much stronger. The killing of little Billy Cordette was simply a science experiment, a test in the ways of half-life. He held the boy by both arms, slowly increasing the essence of death that his enhanced cells exuded. Billy struggled and screamed for his mother. He kicked and bit but finally submitted to the killing force running up and down the muscles of his body. Gray Man saw the repose of extinction as beautiful. It was as if life existed only for this beautiful moment. A cut flower, a roast suckling pig. I felt as Gray Man did and at the same time I trembled in a dark corner of our mind.

Gray Man was dressed in a green suit with a yellow shirt, brown hat, and brown shoes when he got back to Oakland. He returned to the house where Horace had died and looked up at the immense oak that Horace LaFontaine had watched during his last days. Gray Man stood there a long time looking at the house. On the lawn there was a tiny sign that read ROOM FOR RENT.

Inside Gray Man’s skull Horace LaFontaine hollered.

Gray Man stood there because of his fine sense of what life is composed of — pain.

“Why do you scream, Horace?” Gray Man asked.

Inside his mind Gray Man had come to a small cell like the one Horace had lived in for seven years at Attica. Horace was in his cell, but he could see what Gray Man could see. He saw his sister’s home. The large wooden house painted white and trimmed in gray.

“Let her alone!” Horace cried.

“Are you afraid for her?” Gray Man asked softly.

“Let her alone!”

“Pain is the center of life, Horace. Without pain, without anguish, there is nothing but me.” Gray Man peered into the imaginary cell at the memory of a life.

Horace saw in those eyes an infinite black field at night, under no moon or star.

“I am here to give you life, Horace. You struggled so hard against me in the tomb. You tried to take your body back, to have life again. But you cannot take life from death. You cannot defeat me.” Gray Man smiled. “But I can give you pain. It is similar to the gift of life. It is life’s border.”

“Please let her alone, man. You don’t want her,” Horace said. “You want them people like that coyote.”

“Come on, Horace,” Gray Man said. “Let’s go see your sister bleed.”

“No!” Horace yelled. “No, no, no, no, no, no!”

Gray Man’s mind filled with the protestations of life. He enjoyed Horace’s screaming. He had learned a lot from his host. He could be rid of him anytime now. There was no more need for Horace LaFontaine. But Gray Man kept the dead ex-con in his prison cell, in perpetual night, looking out at the full moon, always hungry. The only food he served him was raw, maggot-infested carrion.

Keeping Horace around made for an interesting and important game.

Horace was dead, merely an elaborate figment of Gray Man’s imagination. But Horace felt alive. When Gray Man let him out of his cell, fed him decent food, let him think he was healthy and strong — then they could fight.

Death versus life.

Horace used all of his will to try and overturn Gray Man, to retake his body and freedom. In these battles Gray Man learned much of the ingenuity of life. He felt the maddening beat of life. He learned what it took to squash out flesh’s pitiful molecular spasm.

“Yes?” She was young and brown, not Elza.

Somewhere inside his mind Gray Man could feel Horace sigh and then laugh. Laughter was their greatest weapon, Old Man Death knew. If life could laugh, then death had to be absolute. And if life proved anything, it was that death was not complete, not yet.

“You have a room to let, young lady?”

She hesitated a moment and then smiled again. “Sure,” she said. “But I don’t know if you’d like it. I mean, we usually just have a student up there.”

“I’ve been away and I need a place to stay. I was walking down your street and noticed the sign. I’m looking for my family.”

“Are you English?” the young woman asked.

Horace could see her through the window Gray Man had opened for him to witness the torture and murder of his sister. The young woman was very dark with small features that made for a plain face. Her figure was slight, not the kind of woman that he went after in life.

“Why no,” Gray Man said accenting his dead words. “I’m from the Islands. Will you show me the room?”

Horace watched the slim-figured young woman as she climbed the stairs. Gray Man saw nothing. He wasn’t interested in life. He wasn’t interested in this girl.

“What’s your name?” Gray Man asked at the door to Horace’s old room. He didn’t care, but he knew from Horace that this was what was called manners.

“Joclyn. Joclyn Kyle. What’s yours?”

“Redstar,” Gray Man said. “Grey Redstar. I’m from Trinidad originally, but I’ve traveled almost everywhere.”

“Oh,” she said as she fumbled around with the skeleton key in the door lock.

Horace’s room was just as he had left it. The big brass bed was the same. The maple chest of drawers and the broken-down sofa chair. The round maroon carpet in the center of the floor was new. The oak outside the window had grown a few new branches.

“I’ll take it,” Gray Man said. “How much?”

“One hundred twenty-five a month,” Joclyn said, obviously embarrassed by the high price. “But that includes utilities and kitchen privileges. Uncle Morris says that you can use the stove and the refrigerator as long as you clean up and don’t abuse the privilege.”

“Your uncle lives with you?”

“This is his house. He lets me stay here while I study at school. I’m from down in LA.”

“Do I pay you now?” Gray Man asked.

“Uncle Morris wants to meet somebody before they take the place,” Joclyn said. “He won’t be back till six.”

Gray Man stood there in the small room, staring at Joclyn. He considered killing her because he didn’t know what to do next. But he couldn’t find anywhere in Horace’s memories an excuse for such an act. And Gray Man wanted to be normal. He would have liked to kill Elza, to savor Horace’s pain, but more than that he needed a place to stay. He needed to be where the light struck. He needed to find his brethren.

“May I wait for him?” Gray Man asked.

“Well, not really, I have to go soon. To school, you know.”

Gray Man became angry then. He wasn’t used to waiting or to someone telling him no. He had no patience with the girl Joclyn or her absent uncle and so he receded, back into the dark cave of his mind.

Horace’s cell melted away, and suddenly he stood there before the plain girl.

“Uh,” stalled Horace. “Uh, well, maybe, I mean, I’ll go back out and come back around six. Six, right?”

Horace turned to leave but then turned back again.

“What part’a LA you from?” he asked. His voice was the same but the accent had become Southern.

Joclyn frowned and said, “On Compton Boulevard. I was born in Mississippi, in Greenwood, but I don’t remember it.”

“I lived on Slauson once,” Horace said. “A long time ago. Long time. But I used to go to a barbecue place on Compton. It was called... lemme see now... It was called, um, Bolger’s. Yeah, that’s it — Bolger’s.”

“I know Bolger’s. We used to go there all the time.” The happy smile on Joclyn’s face, the smile of a lonely girl who has found a displaced kindred spirit, might have sparked some interest in Horace, when he was alive.

“I gotta go,” he said.

Horace hurried down the stairs with the young landlady in his wake.

He was out the front door and walking away when Joclyn called out from the door, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Redstar.” Horace waved but didn’t say anything more.

Gray Man allowed Horace to walk until he found a place for them to wait.

Horace savored each moment. It wasn’t an hallucination. It wasn’t a lie. Somehow he knew that he’d been given a day pass from death. He found a bus stop on Peralta. While Gray Man lay dormant, Horace sat there watching pigeons peck, fly, and fornicate. The traffic moved. Every now and then an airplane or jet passed overhead. A breeze felt chilly on Horace’s face. He realized that there was no temperature in hell, not unless Gray Man wanted it.

Horace sat for more than an hour running the fingers of his left hand over the back of his right. His light touch, passing from wrist to fingertip, was more life than all of his drunken binges and back-alley brawls.

On his mumbling lips was a prayer, a hope that he had paid his penance and that God would let him live out a few weeks on this bench before he passed on to eternal rest.

But Gray Man was through with his plans. He could feel how peaceful and happy Horace LaFontaine was, and he didn’t like it, but the dark recesses of his mind were so pure that he decided to stay for a while.

In his mind there were no crazy, jangly, fleshy feelings. No monotonous pumping, hungering, snuffling around. In his inner cave Gray Man could ponder the infinite. He could send his mind outward past all things physical, past the limits of logic. He could bask in the glow of the giant blue eye of energy — the first thought. Basking in this pure notion of reality, Gray Man wondered how any true sentient being could think that mixing with flesh could be an improvement. It would be like a butterfly turning back into a worm, like a tree trying to press itself back down to a seed, like a sun worshiping dust.

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.

Seven

When 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.

So I walked the seventeen steps it took me to reach them, realizing as I walked that every fact and action I took from then on would be of interest to generations that follow. Up until then I had been a follower and an acolyte. I was writing a history about something I was seeing unfold. But now it came to me that I was a piece of that history. Like my hero Thucydides, I was a part of some of the most important events in the history of the world. Those seventeen steps might be remembered as were Job’s trials and Socrates’ hemlock.

There was nothing special about the mother. Just another hippie. Young but with strands of premature gray shot through her long red hair. Her skin was very tanned and red underneath the tan. The tiny wrinkles around her eyes and jaw were from long hours spent out of doors.

The child wore a homemade dress cut from a purple tie-dyed sheet. It was just a sack with arms and neck cut into it. The woman wore boy’s jeans and a shirt of Indian fabric that was made from blue, red, and dull orange cloths that had been pieced together. There were tiny mirrors and patches of dark lace nested here and there throughout the garment.

Both she and the girl smelled strongly of patchouli oil.

“Hi,” I said to the mother and child.

The girl jumped out of her mother’s arms and into mine. The quickness of her movements shocked me.

“Do you know Bill Portman?” the woman asked while her daughter dug both hands into my unkempt natural and tugged. The child laughed.

“I don’t think so,” I said, stalling.

“You’re beautiful,” the child said as she rubbed her hand across my nose and mouth. Her fingers smelled of peanut butter.

I was surprised that her mother didn’t take her back or make her stop. But then I thought that this was just another hippie who wasn’t afraid to let her child explore the world around her.

“They also called him” — the mother stalled and pressed her fingers between her eyes — “Ordé.”

The child started laughing. She wrapped her arms around my head and squeezed. She was strong for her age, but I had a hard head, hard enough to take police sticks when they raided squatters in the Haight. My head was as hard as it needed to be, but I wasn’t stupid.

“Are you Adelaide?” I asked the woman.

She nodded and said, “And this is Julia.”

“That’s not my name,” the child whispered.

“And you’re looking for Ordé?” I asked.

“I need him,” Adelaide said. “He has to help me with her. Every night she’s been waking up terrified. And she keeps talking about things I don’t get, only I kinda remember Bill saying the same things.”

“What does she say?”

“Hey,” the little girl in my arms said.

Adelaide looked directly into my eyes and said, “I know it sounds crazy, but she’s always talking about planets that don’t have suns that planted people here. That’s the kind of stuff Bill used to say, but lately she’s been saying something different, that everyone will die. And somehow I feel like maybe she’s right.” A shudder went through the hippie mother’s shoulders.

There were no other offspring from the Blues that were known, though Coyote was pregnant before she saw the light. Ordé went out once every six months or so, when everything was right, he said, to try and impregnate some woman. It had never worked, to our knowledge. The women usually got sick, and none of them ever came up pregnant.

Ordé had asked me to go down to Pomona to look for Adelaide, to see if she had taken his seed.

“She was sitting right next to me, Chance,” Ordé said. “When the light struck. She was sleeping and so she wouldn’t be transformed, but her skin might have taken in something — she was naked. I don’t know, maybe a little got in through her eyelids. It wouldn’t take much. Find her. Maybe she has our firstborn of Earth.”

I did find her family, but by then their daughter had come and gone. She’d left because her father said that if she came up pregnant, he’d want her to get an abortion.

I got all that from her little sister, Ada, who also told me that if her father found a black man asking after his daughter, he’d take out his shotgun and kill him.

I took her word, on all counts, and left. I didn’t think that Adelaide had actually gotten pregnant. I asked Ada, who was nice enough, and she said that as far as she knew, Adelaide was not pregnant. No one else among Ordé’s peers had managed to conceive. Ordé said that it was because of their potency. He believed that it was more likely for a woman of his kind to take the sperm from a normal man than for a Blue male to impregnate a normal woman. He believed that sperm from the blue light would devour the ova. But Claudia Heart hadn’t conceived either.

There had been a few attempts to intermingle between the Blues, but the effect was quite toxic. Gijon Diaz and Phyllis Yamauchi tried once. The result was a skin rash that spread all over Diaz’s body, and Phyllis developed a fever from which she almost died. Ordé said that it wasn’t a chemical reaction that caused the maladies. He said that the Blues suffered because of something that arose from the original radiance of blue light. Once one had experienced the light in his own eyes, Ordé said, he could not share another’s vision.

“I asked around, and some people said that I might find him around here. Do you know where he is?” Adelaide asked me.

“Tomorrow,” I said. “But you better get away from here until then.”

“Why?”

“Maybe what Julia’s scared about isn’t so crazy. There’s some bad shit goin’ down,” I said, my adopted street tongue slipping in with fear.

“What do you mean?” Adelaide asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Let’s just go,” I said. “I’ll tell you on the way down.”

And I did tell her. I told her about what I knew of Ordé. I told her about his visions and dreams of unity. It sounded ridiculous coming out of my mouth, but I knew the truth of my words and hoped that Addy (that’s what she asked me to call her) would hear that truth.

I didn’t say anything about blood or blood rituals. I didn’t say anything about Ordé reading people’s minds by tasting their blood. But I did tell her about Grey Redstar. I told her that he had already killed Phyllis Yamauchi.

On the walk I carried Julia. She climbed up my arm and onto my back. She once stood up on top of my head and then leaped down, grabbing on to me about the waist.

She was an amazing child.

We walked along the street toward my flophouse room. I was thinking that Addy trusted me with no reason, really. I could have been lying to her about everything. Or I could have been crazy. But that wasn’t a time of distrust. We had our long hair and our drugs and our music. Everything about us, young people, was revolutionary. The way we made love, whom we loved. The best plans were laid in seconds; our greatest leaders denied the history praised in schools.

What was so wonderful about Addy was something that I couldn’t use my newfound sight to see; she trusted me. She took that walk, her daughter in my arms, believing that I wouldn’t harm her.

I thought about Ordé and his light. I had seen his visions, traveled among the stars back to those primal molecules that wound through time and around the universe. I was a drone in a cosmic game larger than anything ever imagined by priest or zealot. I was a half-aware particle in a light much greater than any star. I was life becoming a higher matter.

I was, as Ordé once said, a pool on whose surface shimmered the image of God.

But still Addy offered me something more delicate than a flake of ash rising from a campfire flame. It wasn’t her but her trusting me that said something that couldn’t be felt before it was known.

When we reached my street, Julia stopped playing and jumping around. She wrapped her arms around my neck and held on with all her strength — and she was strong.

The front door of my apartment building led to a shattered green-and-black-tile floor with a bank of tin mailboxes to the right and a stairway straight ahead. There was always a slight smell of urine under the stairway, and no real mail was ever delivered because of theft.

I tried to loosen Julia’s grip as we made it up the stairs, but she only held on more tightly. It was actually getting hard for me to breathe, but I didn’t pay much attention because of the fear emanating from the child.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said.

“Don’t be afraid,” she repeated.

We went up the stairs, me choking, Julia shivering, and Addy bringing up the rear.

Up four flights and we were finally at my door. Filtered sunlight streamed in through a half-closed dirty window at the end of the hall.

I put my key into the lock and turned it. The door blew outward because of a draft caused by an open window inside. I didn’t remember leaving a window open, but I could have; I didn’t have anything worth stealing.

He was looking out the window. His back turned to us. A smallish man, well dressed as far as I could see.

I fell back into the visions I got from Ordé’s blood for a moment. I was looking out of Grey Redstar’s eyes into the bloody entrails of Phyllis Yamauchi. When Death’s hardened hands kneaded and crushed the organs and flesh, small sparks of blue surfaced and extinguished, leaving behind traces that held images of Phyllis’s consciousness. One of these images was me and a trail of footsteps leading to my door.

I hollowed out my stomach and pushed backward, using my toes. Addy grunted and Julia released her grip. The man turned around as I yelled, “Run!”

He was a black man with two large fleshy bumps on his face, one above his left eye and one on his right cheek. For a moment there was sorrow in his eyes, almost an apology. By then I was back out across the threshold. As I slammed the door, my new sight picked up an explosion of deep blue hues.

“Oh, my God!” Addy cried as if she had shared my sight.

“Not that way!” I yelled at her.

She was running toward the window, not the stairs. Our fire escape had rotted away, but the landlord was waiting for the city to make him fix it.

The door behind me flew off its hinges, and Gray Man, in the body of Horace LaFontaine, fell into the hall. I ran down to the window to protect the child and mother, various hues of blue flickering around my second sight.

Julia screamed.

I heard the window open behind me but I couldn’t turn to warn them, because Gray Man was on me. I reached out to stop him; that’s probably what saved my life. He was excited and there was an electrical field around him. The shock threw me on the floor at Addy’s feet. I looked up to see her throw her child through the open window. Before I could rise to help them Gray Man ran up, stepped on my chest, and leaped after the girl.

I raised myself to the sill, fully expecting to see the corpses of both man and child. But what I saw was Gray Man running down the alley behind my building holding a tree branch and looking up at the sky. I followed his gaze until I saw the tiny figure of Julia climbing to the roof of the building across the street. She ran along the edge of the building at great speed and then disappeared.

“Come on!” Adelaide cried.

She was running for the stairs. I limped behind her as well as I could. The electrical shock had turned my muscles to spaghetti. I had to hold on tight to the handrails as I went down the stairs.

“Wait for me, Addy!” I shouted.

When I reached the door she was nowhere that I could see.

When I stepped outside someone grabbed me by the arm. I knew it wasn’t Gray Man, so I said, “It’s all right. I can make it.”

“Lester ‘Chance’ Foote?” someone asked.

I looked up to see Miles Barber standing there. He was wearing a two-piece maroon suit and a stained powder blue shirt. There were five uniformed policemen behind him. Three of them were restraining Addy.

“Let me go!” she screamed.

I tried to hit Barber. I balled my fist and threw it, but he sidestepped and I was so weak that the punch dragged me down until I was on the ground.

They cuffed me while Barber said something about murder and arresting me. Addy was yelling about her daughter, but the cops didn’t seem to care.

I couldn’t bring myself to care either. Touching Gray Man had sent shock waves of death up and down my nerves. I was shaking all over, wishing that I had never been born.

Eight

Miles Barber wasn’t a bad cop. That is to say, he didn’t hate Negroes. He didn’t enjoy other people’s suffering either, I’m sure. But that didn’t mean he’d shrink from violence if it would bring some justice to the situation. He didn’t mind inflicting a little unconstitutional pain.

“Why did you kill Phyllis Yamauchi?” he asked after his friend, Officer Harlan Castro, had hit me on the side of the head with a short length of sand-filled rubber hose.

I felt the pain and heard the question, but I couldn’t react to either. The cool slither of death was still moving along my nerves. It was as if I had died by just touching Gray Man. The feeling of death stayed with me, its images playing over and over in my mind.

I was in a coffin, aware, with no ability to breathe. Days passed like seconds as the coffin deteriorated and the worms ate my eyes.

“Phyllis Yamauchi,” someone said.

I imagined that Gray Man was waiting downstairs. Castro hit me down the center of my forehead with the hose. I fell off the chair, terrified that they would release me into the arms of Death. I wanted to confess, to be put in jail. Maybe in prison I could be free of his touch.

Maybe in prison I could finally kill myself and be forever beyond his designs.

But I also wanted Ordé. I wanted to hear his tempered logic. I wanted to think about a future world where I was welcome in the hearts of stars.

Life beckoned me while Death waited down in the street. The confession hung in my throat. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that I was bleeding.

Then I began to cry.

I hadn’t cried like that since I was a small child. It was a deep shuddering wail of helplessness. The two cops tried to lift me onto the chair, but I was a big man with the coordination of an infant. All they could do was prop me up against the wall.

All I could do was cry.

I tried to confess, but not one word was coherent. Miles Barber was holding a handkerchief against my scalp, trying to staunch the bleeding. But I was moving my head from side to side, seeing death in one corner and something beyond life in the other. I wanted Castro to hit me harder. Miles was talking to me in soft tones intended to pull me out of despair.

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.