Inside a Silver Box

by Walter Mosley

  SIX

  RONNIE BOTTOMS WAS wrapped in sleep that was both deep and innocent. When he awoke he could not remember ever experiencing such peace and revitalization. He smiled at the morning sun that lit his face, warmed his skin. Everything was different but he couldn’t remember how his life had changed. He had been in jail and then was out again, he was going to rob a man and then decided not to rob him … no. The man spoke to him … no. The girl …

  Ronnie sat up and stared down upon the woman sleeping a few feet away. She was wearing a soiled jogger’s suit. She looked familiar … and not.

  “It is what you would call a miracle,” a voice said.

  Ronnie turned to look behind him and saw an elderly and tall black man wearing a white suit and a red shirt. This man was barefoot and his smile beatific.

  “What is?” Ronnie asked, marveling at the musical tone of his own voice.

  “What happened before—” The man stopped to consider his next words. “I mean what happened last night.”

  “I don’t exactly remember,” Ronnie said. “I did somethin’ bad, right?”

  “We all have,” the tall and elegant and very dark man said.

  “Who are you?” Ronnie asked.

  “I used to be Claude Festerling from South Carolina,” the man said, and then he squatted down, sinking his fingers into the hard stone beneath his haunches. “But I drank too much wine and crawled up in here one day, fell asleep, and never woke up. You know a man gets so old and drunk that one day he’s just got to lay his burden down.”

  Ronnie didn’t remember the man’s body being there before. He didn’t understand how a man could dig his fingers into solid stone.

  “When was that?” the younger man asked.

  “Time’s a funny thing but that were 1969, the way people around here see it. July nineteen, Claude Festerling’s last day on Earth.”

  “So you’re like a ghost?”

  “Like that.”

  “You say you used to be Claude whatever, who are you now?”

  The black man smiled once more, as if Ronnie were a student who gave the right answer without being asked a question.

  “Should we wake her up?” Used-to-be-Claude asked, gesturing toward Lorraine’s prone figure.

  Ronnie turned to look at the somewhat familiar young woman and she sat up as if the men’s attention had beckoned her. The first thing she did was to look down at her hands. She gasped and caressed one with the other. Then she bounded toward Ronnie and wrapped her arms around his neck.

  “You did it!” she cried. “You brought me back!”

  “I guess I did,” Ronnie said, hardly believing his own words.

  “I’m so happy that you’re alive,” Lorraine said with both sadness and gratitude in her gaze.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Ronnie asked.

  Without answering, Lorraine released him, moving back a step. Ronnie got to look at her. The chain of events of the past few weeks came back to him. He remembered with clarity he never had before about killing the girl and leaving her body in a hole in the ground.

  “You look different,” Ronnie said. “Almost the same, but your skin is darker and your left eye is brown. Was it like that before?”

  Lorraine grinned and shook her head. “One of your eyes is now green,” she said, “and you’re much smaller than when you murdered me. Just as tall but not so heavy.”

  As if on cue, they fell to their knees facing each other. They clasped hands like little children who have just made friends.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I mean about hittin’ you in the head like that. I was just so mad and so hungry.”

  “I know.”

  Used-to-be-Claude hunkered down next to them and smiled. “I’m so happy that we could all be together here and now,” the old dead man said.

  “Do you feel like Claude used to?” Ronnie asked.

  “No,” the Silver Box replied. “He was dead for too long before I noticed him. I have many of his memories and mannerisms, but the man who held that knowledge is gone.”

  “But if you have all his memories and you talkin’ like him, then why isn’t he here?”

  “The essence attached to this body, or a body much like this one, drifts, is always drifting. When death occurs, this essence hovers for a few moments and then rises up.”

  Ronnie remembered the feeling that being ripped apart would free him from the crimes of his physical husk.

  “So it’s not so bad?” Ronnie said.

  Used-to-be-Claude smiled again and nodded, but then a shadow moved across his reconstituted features.

  “What’s wrong?” Lorraine asked.

  “I, I don’t know. Something is off in my system. I didn’t realize it at first. I mean I have never experienced resurrection in just the way you two have made it. I was simply a conduit, but the creation lay with you.”

  “I felt you on my right side,” Ronnie said.

  Again, the personification of the ultimate-weapon-turned-rebel brightened and again his expression said that there was something wrong.

  “I have to go,” he said. “I have to, have to look into things, see what passed over to where it shouldn’t be.”

  The form of Used-to-be-Claude stood up straight and then his body fell in on itself like the fast-forwarded film of a piece of fruit drying up in moments instead of days. Finally the simulacrum turned into dust, leaving the empty white suit and red shirt to fall to the ground.

  “He’s gone,” Lorraine said.

  “He’s everywhere,” Ronnie added, thinking of his mother’s pastor and his powerful belief in Jehovah.

  Lorraine cupped Ronnie’s jaw with her hands and stared into his eyes. “That was amazing,” she said.

  “The way he disappeared?”

  “How you brought me back to life. You took my soul inside you and used your own body to give mine form and reality.”

  “That Vietnamese man killed a lotta people, huh?” Ronnie asked.

  “But he thought he was doing the right thing,” Lorraine answered with a nod. “He didn’t realize until he was in the position of his victims what he had done.”

  “You mean like people are bad but they don’t even know it?” Ronnie asked.

  “I guess so,” Lorraine said. “But like with you, all you have to do is give somebody a chance to reach out and they might.”

  “They might not,” Ronnie said. “I could have pulled away from you when that thing grabbed my arm. I knew that if I did that, you’d be stuck here in that dead body like Claude’s soul was.”

  “But you didn’t pull away.”

  “But I coulda.”

  Lorraine’s smile was familiar, like the tattoo on his mother’s breast. This close feeling seemed impossible to the suddenly reformed thug, but there it was.

  “What should we do?” Lorraine asked.

  “You think Claude’s coming back?”

  “It’s not Claude, but the Silver Box. He could be gone for minutes or years. Maybe we should get out of here and put ourselves together.”

  “We are kind of a mess, right?” Ronnie said. He was still amazed by the lightness in his voice and at the spiritual serenity that had replaced his perpetual physical hunger.

  SEVEN

  “WHAT SHOULD WE do?” Lorraine asked Ronnie. It was still early morning but there was bright sunlight all around.

  “I know a thrift store over on Ninth Avenue,” he said. “You got any money?”

  “In my belt pack,” she said. “I always carry my wallet in there.”

  Looking at Ronnie, Lorraine suddenly became aware of herself. Since waking up, she’d had the feeling of when she was a spirit restlessly searching for her killer. But then, suddenly, she felt alive. Looking at Ronnie, she saw him as her killer not her savior.

  She sneered at this notion and then, in contradistinction to this feeling, she smiled brilliantly.

  Though he couldn’t have put it into words, Ronnie understood what Lorraine was feeli
ng and thinking. “I’m so sorry, girl. I mean, I was wrong but it was like I couldn’t even help it. I mean, I just didn’t care.”

  The young woman’s smile darkened but did not disappear. She nodded and stood up. “The world is magic,” she said. “If you tip your head and look at it from a different point of view, it all changes, everything.”

  “It don’t change what I did,” Ronnie said. “It don’t bring back my mother or make up for all the people I hurted.”

  “Can you feel all the people out there in the park?” Lorraine asked. His apologies angered her and so she changed the subject.

  “No. Can you?”

  Nodding, the young, now darker-skinned white girl said, “I can almost hear what they’re thinking. Almost. And do you know how many of them have brought a person back to life?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “None. Not a single man, woman, or child anywhere in the park has ever done that. Nobody in the history of the world has. Not even the Silver Box could do it unless it destroyed everything else.”

  Ronnie wondered about himself listening to the young woman with the crazy multicolored eyes. It came to him that he had hardly ever listened to anything but the hunger in his heart. He sometimes listened to his mother, but only when she held him could she could dispel the roar of his cravings.

  Lorraine understood his emotions. For her, he was the most important being that had ever existed—but this didn’t stop her from hating him, just a little.

  “Let’s go to that thrift sto’ and get some clothes,” he said.

  * * *

  RONNIE WAITED PATIENTLY while Lorraine tried on one dress after another. There were stripes and bright colors, little black numbers and a few skirts with blouses. With each new ensemble, she’d come out from behind the thrift store dressing screen and do a twirl, asking for his advice.

  “I don’t know,” he’d say, “looks nice.”

  And she’d be off again.

  He picked out a pair of dark brown work pants and a short-sleeved yellow dress shirt. He also bought a pair of blunt-toed brown leather shoes.

  “I don’t know why I can’t make up my mind,” she said after trying on the eighth or ninth getup. “I usually just take the first thing I see—that or I know what I want before I get to the store.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I could sit on this stool just as well as anywhere else. I mean, where I got to go?”

  Lorraine took the question seriously. She stared at her savior and murderer, considering the reply. She was trying on a mid-calf light blue dress with white frill along the high neck.

  “We need to clean up and talk about what’s happened,” she said. “I’ll take this dress and those red flats and we can go.”

  “Where?” Ronnie asked.

  “I guess we could go to my place,” she speculated, “but…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I mean it didn’t feel like it, but it’s been weeks since you, since you killed me.” Speaking the words out loud sent a shiver through her mind and a chill across her heart. “I guess I don’t want to see anybody I know for a little bit.”

  * * *

  THEY CHECKED INTO the huge and fancy Halsey Hotel at 4:15 that Tuesday afternoon. They got a room with two single beds and a window that looked out into an internal ventilation shaft.

  Lorraine showered first and came out wrapped only in a plush white towel. Ronnie looked at her long runner’s legs and her once pale now olive skin. If this were two days ago, he knew, he would have been on her in a minute—on that pussy like motherfucker. But that was before his hunger was satisfied by pouring out his insides like cereal into the empty bowl named Lorraine Fell.

  “You want to have sex with me?” Lorraine asked.

  “Why you say that?”

  “The way you’re looking.”

  “Just rememberin’,” he said. “Rememberin’ how I used to be day before yesterday.”

  He had already seen himself in the full-length bathroom mirror.

  He was still about five-ten but his girth had gone from extra-extra-large to just about medium. The scale at Rikers had said that he was 289 pounds when he was released. The hotel scale read 168. His skin, if anything, was a little bit darker and his right eye was now green. Even his big fat-fingered hands had slimmed down and tapered. He looked to himself like he knew something and he wondered what that something was.

  “Just remembering?” Lorraine asked.

  “I was wonderin’ how much you weighed.”

  “The scale in there says one oh nine.”

  * * *

  RONNIE SHOWERED AND then dressed, returned to the room and saw that Lorraine had had the kitchen send up a platter of two dozen chicken wings with blue cheese dressing and a fruit bowl. There was also a big bottle of water and a pail of ice.

  He ate two wings while Lorraine devoured the rest.

  “Looks like I gave you my appetite along with everything else,” he said.

  She smiled at the joke and then felt that angry chill again. It was, she thought, like the Silver Box looked before abandoning the dead black man’s body and going off to search his circuits for something gone wrong.

  * * *

  THEY FELL ASLEEP early in the single beds set side by side.

  Lorraine tossed and turned, dreaming that she was a corpse whose only life festered at the core of its being. She was, even in her sleep, being revivified, experiencing the pain and ecstasy of life.

  Ronnie’s dream was an even heartbeat resounding through a dark sleeping world. The constant pulse lulled the already sleeping man until it skipped once and he was suddenly awake, lying in the dark hotel room.

  “Are you up, Ronnie?”

  “Yeah. How did you know?”

  “I just woke up too.”

  “That was crazy, right?” he said.

  “Waking up at the same time?”

  “Naw, that Claude guy, Silver Box thing.”

  “It’s like it was God or something.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “But what?” Lorraine asked.

  “But it’s like he was a big kid thinkin’ that some little bugs like us was his friends.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  He heard her moving restlessly under the blankets. “I mean we can’t even tell nobody,” Ronnie said, “even if we wanted to, because there really ain’t no proof except for our eyes and you lookin’ like you got a tan. I lost some weight, but anybody could do that.”

  “They wouldn’t believe us.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Come over here,” Lorraine said.

  Ronnie got out of the bed and lay down next to his victim and newfound friend. He wanted to give her sexually what he’d already done through the conduit of the Silver Box, but his flesh would not respond.

  After a few loveless kisses and an unfruitful embrace, he fell away from her and said, “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” Lorraine whispered, and she wrapped her thighs around him, rubbing her sex against his leg.

  Ronnie put an arm around her and held tight.

  “That’s it,” she moaned. “Hold me tight, baby. Don’t let go.”

  She pushed and twisted harder and harder, biting his chest and shoulder. At one point, she moved up and loomed over him, groaning loudly and pressing down hard with her pubis.

  “Give it to me, motherfucker,” she cried. “Give it to me!”

  There was something gratifying for Ronnie in Lorraine’s orgasm. He tried to remember ever making a woman cry out with passion like that before.

  After a long straining silence, she slumped down next to him.

  “Lorraine?”

  “What?”

  “Are you mad that I couldn’t get hard?”

  “I’m mad at you,” she said, taking the opportunity of his question to express what she was trying not to feel. “In a way, I hate you for what you did. But then it’s like I know you’re a part of me and, and I don�
�t know how I feel.”

  “But you don’t mind that I couldn’t fuck?”

  “Not at all. Does it bother you that I’m so pushy?”

  “Uh-uh. Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you think you’re like, um, mad at me and love me at the same time?”

  “Part of me hates you.” She realized the weight of these words as she spoke them. “I don’t know about feeling love anymore. But I do know that you are in my heart and that means more than anything—even if I don’t want it to.”

  Upon hearing her declaration, Ronnie fell back into the dream of a heart beating while he slept inside.

  * * *

  WHEN THE DOOR banged open, Ronnie jerked up quickly.

  “Hands where we came see ’em!” a cop in full battle gear shouted.

  He and his three similarly clad comrades were toting shotguns and moving quickly but with caution.

  The old Ronnie put up his hands from his seated position in the bed.

  “Who the fuck are you guys?” Lorraine spat. “What are you doing in our room?”

  “Lorraine Fell?” the lead cop asked.

  “Yes?”

  “We traced your credit card here. There’s a bulletin out on you and a warrant out for Ronald Bottoms’s arrest.”

  “Warrant for what?” Ronnie asked softly.

  “Outta that bed,” the cop said instead of answering. “And if I even think I see a weapon, you’re dead.”

  EIGHT

  IN THE INTERROGATION room of the Midtown precinct station Ronnie, with one hand manacled to the floor, sat on a metal chair, at a metal table.

  Both the table and chair were painted a drab green.

  Ronnie could hear the heartbeat of his dream resounding softly from the corners of the cell.

  Reese Blanders, a uniformed police sergeant with many medals, was questioning him. “You know you’re going back to prison, don’t you, Ronnie?” the cop said. His tone was matter-of-fact, like a weatherman predicting showers.