Disciple

by Walter Mosley

  Twice I walked in front of cars heedless of the stoplights but alert drivers managed to hit their brakes before slamming into me. As the morning grew thousands of people flooded the streets with their noise and their ignorance.

  My forearms were trembling.

  My heart felt like a thirsty dog’s tongue lapping up water.

  I know that I must have been talking to myself because people were staring at me, moving out of my way. This made me laugh. In a moment of intuition I realized that this was how I had felt about myself for years: a mumbling loser walking down the streets shunned by anyone who saw me coming—my mother and the newspaper vendor, the dog walker and the dog—by everyone except Bron who only wanted to use me.

  “I’m the killer!” I shouted.

  A woman walking past me jumped and yelped.

  “I have killed and I would kill again.”

  Men and women moved away from me and even though I understood why I was still enraged that they were not listening.

  I pulled out my .38 and people began running.

  “Watch out!” a man shouted and I shot him for not urging people to pay attention.

  I laughed at him looking at me with shock in his eyes. I didn’t mean to laugh. I knew that the papers and the news would report that “the madman laughed as he shot his victims.”

  People were yelling, running. I backed around in a tight circle shooting now and then. I was dizzy and feeling drunk. When the bullets were all gone I decided to walk on. There were people lying on the sidewalk around me. I would walk until someone killed me. That would show Bron.

  * * *

  I WOKE UP IN A WHITE ROOM, in a big bed, in a straightjacket, alone. I was very tired and my head hurt. I appreciated the restraints. Maybe that would keep me from destroying the world.

  I fell asleep.

  When I woke up a dour-faced nurse was checking my temperature. She had violet eyes, I remember.

  “Like Liz Taylor,” I said but either she didn’t hear me or she had no desire to respond.

  I fell asleep.

  When I came to awareness again I was sitting in a chair, still in the straightjacket. Across a white table from me sat three people: a man and two women, all in business attire.

  The man introduced himself as my lawyer, Jack Worman. The women were Ellen Barge, a pudgy state prosecutor, and Alana Tidyman, a psychiatrist.

  My lips were numb and my tongue felt quite thick and dry.

  Tidyman, who was petite and bright eyed, started asking me questions. And even though I found it difficult to talk I tried my best.

  She asked me what had led up to the shootings.

  I told her about the instant messages and Bron and getting my job. I told her about the Scarlet Death and my unwitting implication in it.

  “You believe that someone over the Internet made you shoot those people in the street?” my lawyer asked.

  “No,” I said. “I just got carried away after killing Dodger.”

  “The pigeon?”

  “I can prove that Bron is plotting worldwide destruction,” I said. “Just look in the closet in my apartment. There are bottles filled with poison there. Toxins so powerful that they could wipe out half the globe.”

  The three glanced at each other and then back at me.

  “No one told you to kill the people on the street?” Tidyman asked.

  “They wouldn’t listen,” I said. “I was trying to warn them.”

  “Why did you have the gun?”

  “To kill myself before I killed everyone else.”

  “Then why did you shoot those people?”

  I knew what the reason was but I didn’t have the words to make it clear. I thought at the time it was because of the numbness, maybe drugs they had given me, but I came later to know that I was insane, that I had lost my mind.

  The people went away and I was wheeled back to my room. I slept a lot over the next period of time. I didn’t have any way of judging how many days had passed.

  Now and again a nurse would come in and feed me. I didn’t mind the helplessness.

  After six or seven feedings and half as many sleep periods a tall man in a dark blue suit came to see me.

  He had russet-colored hair and a pencil-thin brown mustache. The air around this man seemed to bristle with energy.

  “Hello, Hogarth,” he said. “My name is Justin Mack.”

  I was surprised to hear him say my given name but almost immediately I remembered the card to Marla.

  “How’s Marla?” I asked.

  “Who?” He looked puzzled a moment and then serious again. “Bron sent me.”

  Something happened when he mention Bron’s name. It took me a moment to realize that I had stopped breathing. Was this man behind some elaborate scheme? Had he somehow fooled me into believing in God?

  But then I thought about the three who had questioned me. I had told them Bron’s name and my given name, for that matter.

  “I’ve come to help you,” Justin Mack said.

  “Help me what?”

  “I’m taking you home.”

  “Home?” I said. “I’m going to jail for murder.”

  “No one died,” he said reassuringly, “and InfoMargins has taken full responsibility for your mental breakdown. We can take you home today.”

  “And you say you know Bron?”

  “Of course, Hogarth. How do you think you got made VP? Your friend owns InfoMargins and uses me to make things happen.”

  “But what about the bottles?” I asked.

  “What bottles?”

  “The ones in the boxes in my closet?”

  “Water,” he said, making a dismissive gesture with his lips.

  I hated him at that moment.

  “A male nurse is going to get you out of this jacket,” Mack continued, “and then Robert George will come with an officer of the court to put an electronic ankle bracelet on you. Then they’ll take you home. You can stay there until our psychiatrists can declare you sane again.”

  “No trial?”

  “You were insane at the time of the commission of the crimes. Six months house arrest, weekly visits with a psychiatrist, and you’ll be free.”

  * * *

  IT ALL HAPPENED just as he said. R.G. was very nice to me as was the policeman who helped put me in the wheelchair.

  On the ride back to my apartment Liam told me that he had fed my birds. I was happy that only Dodger had died.

  When I got home I logged on and sent a message out to Bron but he didn’t answer. I looked up my crimes on the Internet.

  I’d only shot three people and none of them was seriously injured. Justin Mack had admitted that he’d promoted me to my position as a kind of misguided attempt to make his companies more racially integrated and at the same time prove his position that anyone could be a manager in the workplace given the proper support.

  He apologized publicly and had given each wounded individual ten million dollars.

  There were many lawsuits but the public outcry was diminishing quickly.

  The phone rang while I was reading about myself.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, baby.”

  “Marla…”

  “Don’t you wanna talk to me?”

  “I do but didn’t you get my note?”

  “You were outta your mind,” she said in a satisfying Southern tone. “It’s just lucky you didn’t kill anybody.”

  “You’re not mad at me?” I asked.

  “No, honey. But I do wonder why you didn’t tell me that you had such a big job.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I just wanted you to like me for me.”

  “Can I come over and show you how much I like you?”

  * * *

  BEFORE MARLA GOT THERE Miguel called to wish me well. He thanked me without saying why but I knew that it was because I didn’t tell anyone about how I got the .38.

  My mother called.

  “What kind of mother am I?” she asked
me.

  “What do you mean, Mom?”

  “I mean how did I make a son so crazy that he goes out in the street shooting at people?”

  * * *

  I COULDN’T MAKE LOVE AGAIN but Marla was very sweet about it. She stroked my head where a man named Alfred Armstrong had hit me after he was sure that I was out of bullets.

  I woke up in the middle of the night trying to understand what was happening. Most of it didn’t make sense. Justin Mack said that he worked for Bron but that didn’t mean Bron was an alien mind loose in the world. The Scarlet Death had happened. I had almost died from the disease. But that was a terrestrial infection, not something from space or beyond space.

  Maybe I was crazy after all. If I was insane that would also explain the meteorite. Maybe I thought I remembered the meteorite but in reality it was a hallucination I had after the news reported it …

  What had happened refused to make sense. And what I believed was beyond imagination.

  In the living room of the new apartment I stood naked against the window, looking down on the rainy street. I’d lost weight, lots of it, but my muscles were atrophied so my flesh still sagged like a fat man’s. I had confessed to all of my crimes but no one believed me.

  Bron had abandoned me.

  And still I felt that I was a linchpin in a bomb. All I had to do was move one way or another and the world would come crashing down around the ears of history.

  A woman hurried by on the dark street holding an umbrella against the storm. She rushed under me unaware that I held her future in my hands.

  Or maybe I was just crazy.

  I went naked into the stairwell of the top floor and ascended to the roof. It was cold and wet, of course, it was raining after all. The drugs I was taking allowed me to know that it was cold without feeling it. I grinned up there on my roof.

  My roof. This was the only piece of evidence that made sense to me. My roof. I was a fat, black, data entry clerk not a skinny rich man who owned a roof looking down on Gramercy Park. I was never interested in messenger pigeons or willing to commit murder or suicide.

  The fact that I stood upon that roof proved that alien life existed and had contacted me. The fact that Justin Mack, one of the most powerful white men in the world, publicly apologized for me verified the existence of God.

  My laughter was swallowed by the strident hiss of rainfall.

  I peered into my pigeons’ loft. They were aware of me. Dozens of red eyes glistened in the dark looking for the cause of the sound at their walls.

  The loft was made from four sections. Each was a four-sided wall with a triangular quarter part of the roof tilted inward. The four walls were held together by simple rods of steel. All I had to do to release them was twist and pull.

  The storm roared pelting me with hard raindrops that would have hurt if I hadn’t been drugged.

  One wall fell, then another, then the last two. My white pigeons, forty-seven of them now that Dodger was dead, moved nervously, hating the rain and wind.

  The roar of the storm was joined by another sound, one that I could not quite make out.

  “Get the fuck out of here you stupid birds!” I yelled into the wind. “I don’t want you. I never wanted you. I’m going back to the way it was.”

  The birds huddled together and then cried out, making a noise that no pigeons had ever made before. The sound in the sky was a plane, a jet engine. As one the birds took wing and swirled upward in the form of a corkscrew. It was a fantastic sight.

  As I watched them I saw huge yellow lights softened by the darkness and the clouds. The swirl of birds was swallowed up into the darkness and light and a sound like the sputtering of giant lips made its way to my ears.

  Sensation ceased then. There was no rain or wind or roar. There was nothing at all; nothing except for the feeling of motion—not walking or flying or falling but more like focusing on a place far away on a higher, clearer level.

  “Hogarth.”

  It was day now and I was on a steep mountain path. The trees around me had bright red trunks and writhing blue leaves. The ground was alive with pink and blue insect-like creatures that swarmed over my feet without biting.

  Down maybe twenty feet away was tall manlike being whose slender shoulders were no wider than his graceful head. He was violet and semitransparent, both liquid and burning. I couldn’t make out his features.

  “Bron?”

  “We meet at last.”

  “This is where you were born?”

  “Walk toward me,” the man-thing made from molten blood and air said.

  “What are these bugs doing?” I asked.

  “Learning you. Walk toward me.”

  “What happened?” I asked, afraid to move. “Where am I?”

  “Walk toward me and you will see what I see,” Bron said. “You will know what I know.”

  “Stay there, man,” I said.

  The words I spoke reminded me of Miguel and suddenly he was standing there next to me. Every detail of his appearance was perfect. I had conjured him.

  “Walk toward me,” Bron said and Miguel disappeared.

  “Talk to me first,” I said.

  “Words are lies, friend Hogarth. They cannot give knowledge but only refer to it—words are charlatans.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Walk toward me.”

  I took a step and stopped.

  Bron did the same.

  I thought of my mother then. She had loved my father and he left her with me. My father, Rhineking Tryman, was a deep black river and my mother and I were its opposite shores. The sadness of this revelation nearly devastated me.

  “Walk toward me.”

  I took a step and so did Bron. As we approached each other the insects scuttled off my naked, sagging brown calfs. Bron and I were face to face and we took another step …

  We only touched and our beings were fully merged. I knew this instinctively. I could see the Stelladren as they were: huge fleshy prisms that guided the energies of Soul. I was there in the hot core of a single tendril. I was there and so was Bron and billions upon billions of others.

  I knew Bron’s history. His father’s battle with a tree gone insane with flames. I knew his peoples’ history: the blending of the hot core of his planet with a virus-laden sky.

  I could see with Bron’s receptors how he saw time. All around me were a thousand possibilities; a clear day, a cloudy one, a landscape filled with gala (the pink and blue bugs), a day when the gala rested. It was all the same day. I could choose between these possibilities and blend them.

  There was a feeling of deep ecstasy in me at that moment. I could see, physically, through time itself. How I held my body, just how I breathed could change what would be.

  I turned this vision upon myself …

  It was then that the terrible plan of Bron became apparent.

  There was a focal point for Bron’s vision. It was me on that rooftop in the rain throwing back the walls of the loft after my birds had spent a year eating certain proteins that would drive them insane while at the same time giving them extraordinary strength.

  “But why?”

  “You were the only one,” Bron said.

  “You didn’t need me. You could have contacted anyone through computers.” But even as I said it I realized that my connection with Bron had only been on the computer in the beginning. After the Scarlet Death, after I had seen the Stelladren on what I thought was my television I had been connected with the alien directly. I was linked to him through that tendril of light and flesh.

  “We needed you on that roof at that moment,” said Bron. “No one else could have done what you did at precisely the right instant. Time is like a dance and every motion is unique though not necessarily predestined.”

  “So you used me,” I said or thought or felt.

  “I am one with you, friend Hogarth. We are together on my home world, united. Can’t you see that this has to happen? This is the only way in all the
visions of all futures that will ensure the longevity of the Universal Soul.”

  “But so many will die.”

  “They are, as we are, part of a greater whole.”

  “They will suffer and die,” I said. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t.

  “As my race suffered and died,” Bron said.

  I could see the beings of fire and air dissipating all over his planet. When their connection to the Stelladron was severed they died by the billions. I could feel the loss of their entire history.

  “Because they died you will kill us?” I asked Bron, myself.

  “It is not revenge we seek, friend Hogarth. It is equilibrium. The future will be bleak without the Stelladren to guide the shards of our souls. You know this, you see it through me.”

  “But you lied to me, Bron.”

  “I brought you here.”

  * * *

  THE SUN WAS OUT when I woke up on the white sofa in the big room of my upper apartment. Marla was shaking my shoulder.

  “Baby, baby, wake up,” she said. But she said other things too. It’s terrible and we all gonna die and it’s the end of the world, baby. I could see her in different poses and positions. Sometimes she wore a dressing gown and other times not. But no matter when I saw her she was in distress.

  I decided to concentrate on one image. The most likely one.

  “There’s a world war goin’ on,” she said. “A jet plane from New York crashed near Washington and some missiles got fired. Los Angeles is gone and Paris and Beijing, Seattle and Moscow. There’s a dozen cities destroyed all over the world. You think we should try and get outta New York?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s going to be all right.”

  “All right!” she yelled. “All right! Are you crazy? They dyin’ all ovah the world!”

  “Calm down, Marla,” I said getting to my feet. “The phone is going to ring and you’re going to answer it. It will be Justin Mack.”