Inside a Silver Box

by Walter Mosley

  “Yes, we did,” Lorraine said. “I think that we were in the stars like huge nebular clouds. I think that the Silver Box is everywhere and we were there with him. We were in a clinic just like you said and now we’re ready to go after Ma Lin. The Silver Box is making us go to war.”

  “I don’t think so,” Ronnie said with certainty. “It’s up to us if we want to save the Earth or make it all over again.”

  “It’s so crazy to believe that two little people like us could have such responsibility.”

  “But it’s not just you and me,” Ronnie said, wondering as he spoke where the words were coming from. “It’s you and me and the Silver Box and that dead thing that wasn’t dead inside. It’s me killin’ you and you makin’ me bring you back and us bein’ watched when there was something else tryin’ to get away.”

  “So we go after Ma Lin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do we do when we find him?”

  “We got to find him first,” Ronnie said. He rose to his feet and put out a hand to Lorraine.

  “You told him to go to the zoo,” she said, and then she laughed.

  Looking at Ronnie, Lorraine wondered if the young woman she had been really died and was replaced with someone else who only thought she was that girl.

  SEVENTEEN

  THERE WERE POLICEMEN and park officials coming in and out of the zoo entrance. Access was barred to the public, and dozens of people were standing outside. Among the crowd were a few television crews with reporters talking to the cameras.

  One apple butter brown young woman was having a conversation with a cameraman’s lens.

  “That’s right, Jack,” she answered into the camera, “a man somehow got into the lion’s cage and killed two of the cats. No one saw a weapon, but zoo officials say that both a knife and some kind of bludgeon were used.” There was a pause where the woman looked as if she was listening, and then she said, “Yes, it really is amazing. Usually when a person climbs into the wild animal cages, they’re the ones in danger. But the lions are definitely dead and the man who killed them disappeared into the underground catacombs where there are confinement areas for the animals. Police have blocked all the exits and assure us that they will have him in custody soon.…”

  * * *

  “YOU THINK WE should try to get in there and go after him?” Lorraine asked. Her legs were getting jittery again. Alternately she was pumping both heels almost as if she were running in place.

  “Uh-uh,” Ronnie grunted. “Too many people around here. They’d just get in the way. He’s down there lookin’ for the Silver Box. When he don’t find it, he’ll come out on his own.”

  “But we’re supposed to bring him back.”

  “That’s what we’re after,” Ronnie agreed, “but Ma Lin’s after somethin’ too.”

  “The Silver Box,” Lorraine said.

  “But,” Ronnie added, “the Box and the Laz thing cain’t see each other, so the onliest thing Ma Lin could come aftah is us. All we got to do is get somewhere where we’re alone, and he’ll be tryin’ to get us.”

  “Like he did with those lions?”

  “Just like that.”

  “If two lions couldn’t hurt him, what could we do?”

  “You scared?” Ronnie asked.

  Lorraine considered the question honestly, as a child might. She wondered about the lions and fear and suddenly, brilliantly smiled.

  “Not at all,” she said. “I’m faster than any lion and you’re probably stronger than one.”

  * * *

  THEY WENT TO a fairly isolated part of the park not far from the place where the Silver Box resided. After climbing up into the boughs of a century oak, they perched next to each other in the branches—waiting.

  “It’s kinda strange when we’re next to each other, isn’t it?” Lorraine asked.

  “Yeah. It feels like the way I did when I was a kid and my mama would hold me.”

  “When I close my eyes,” Lorraine said, straining for the right words, “it’s like I’m floating in space and there’s a drummer playing just for me.”

  “I guess you’n me is like brother and sister, huh, Lore.”

  “That’s what my father calls me—Lore. How did you know?”

  “We got the same blood,” he said. “I mean, probably everybody and everything in the world gots the same blood, but somehow you’n me can feel it, ’specially when we’re next to each other.”

  Ronnie saw the words’ impact on Lorraine, and then her blue eye flashed as if a light was shone upon it.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said.

  “I don’t mean to hurt anybody!” a man yelled.

  Turning his gaze upward, Ronnie saw a man’s form hurtling down toward them. Images and thoughts scurried through the young man’s mind: First he realized that he wouldn’t be able to get out of the way and that he probably wouldn’t be able to ward off any blow; second he recognized the man as Ma Lin; and third he saw that there was something odd about the attacker’s hands.

  “I’m sorry!” Ma Lin was screaming when Lorraine, as a blur, jumped at him, colliding with his midsection.

  When Ronnie saw that his newfound soul mate and mortal foe were tumbling down out of the tree toward the ground, he jumped after them.

  Lorraine and Ma Lin hit the ground first but they sprawled where Ronnie landed on his feet.

  “I can’t help myself!” Ma Lin shouted. “I don’t want to!”

  His actions, however, didn’t match his complaints.

  Neither of his arms ended in hands. His left wrist sported what looked like a bayonet made from hardened, olive-colored flesh and his right was a fist turned solid without fingers or thumb.

  Ma Lin jabbed at Ronnie with the blade-hand but the young man sidestepped the thrust and hit his attacker with a solid left hook. Ma Lin fell into a cartwheel movement that brought him to a standing position five feet away. The ex–military policeman lunged once again at Ronnie, this time with both arms raised for attack.

  “I can’t help myself!” he yelled, moving almost as fast as Lorraine.

  Before Ma Lin reached Ronnie, there was a loud knock and then he was on the ground and Lorraine was standing there with yet another branch-club in her hands.

  Immediately Ma Lin was up and jumping toward the girl.

  Ronnie leaped and struck with both hands balled into a single fist. Ma Lin grunted and went down hard but he bounced up again, deftly using the blade hand to pierce Ronnie’s chest.

  “I’m sorry!” Ma Lin screamed. “I’m so sorry!”

  Ronnie fell backwards, feeling the blade unsheathe itself from his breast. His heart pumped once and the range of light diminished by half. Blood flowed copiously from the gash in his chest. There was a woman’s scream and a loud cracking sound. Ronnie’s heart pumped again and the light diminished again by half. Another scream, crack, beat, and Ronnie saw the ground coming up toward his face. He knew he must be falling but this did not change the impression of the ground moving up toward him. He smiled, heard a scream and crack, expected the ground to hit him, but his face and the turf did not meet. He blinked then and wondered if that was the last time his eyes would close. His heart pumped and all his skin felt as if it had been coated with frost.

  When he opened his eyes he expected to see the ground but instead he was looking up through the branches of the big tree. The twilight shone there in light- and dark-speckled articulation between the branches and leaves. There was a robin cocking its head and looking down on him. Ronnie remembered then the green bird that mounted his chest and poked his flesh. His head lolled, maybe not by his volition, and he saw Lorraine cradling him as his mother had. She was smiling at him. He looked down and saw her hand pressing against his bleeding wound. He felt his pulse but the light did not lessen further.

  He had no strength, however, and his line of sight fell away from Lorraine. Now he was looking at the prone body of Ma Lin. The Vietnamese ex-policeman’s head was misshapen and bloody
but he wasn’t dead. His entire body jittered and shook like an egg about to break open. Suddenly a gray green light erupted from the center of the living corpse’s body. It was like the spouting of a Roman candle. The flame left Ma Lin’s body and shot straight up into the sky.

  “Did you … did you … see that?” Ronnie asked Lorraine.

  “Shhh.” She pressed harder against his wound and there was warmth in his hands and feet. She redoubled the pressure and light began to dawn even as the sun was going down.

  Ronnie touched the forearm of the hand that held him. “It’s like if we’re together, we cain’t die,” he said.

  “Shhh.”

  “… like two legs marchin’. Like a swimmer puttin’ out one arm after the other. One can’t do it.”

  “Shhh,” she said, and then, under the pressure of her hand and the admonition, he was asleep.

  EIGHTEEN

  WHEN HE OPENED his eyes again, his vision was stronger but it was night. His head was nestled in Lorraine’s lap and she was leaning back against the tree, asleep, or maybe just too tired to open her eyes.

  He sat up and the world spun one full rotation inside his head.

  Lorraine jerked awake and said, “What’s wrong?”

  “We got to take the body back to Used-to-be-Claude or the Silver Box or whatever he is or will be when we get there.”

  “I’m so tired,” Loraine complained.

  “You killed him to save me?” Ronnie asked, gesturing weakly toward Ma Lin’s cadaver.

  “When I saw him stab you, I went crazy scared. I started screaming and hitting him as fast as I could. I, I didn’t mean to kill him but I was afraid that if I stopped, he’d just turn on me or, or kill you.”

  “You’d think you’d want me dead after what I did to you.”

  “I did,” Lorraine said, responding again with childlike candor. “I still do sometimes. But, but that was just the beginning. It’s like everything before you killed me is history that happened a long time before.”

  When Ronnie stood up, he had to lean against the oak tree to remain upright. He could feel the damp blood stiffening down the front of his shirt and pants.

  “Come on,” he said.

  He hefted the corpse over his shoulder like a duffel bag filled with rags. Lorraine followed him, stiff-legged and staggery. She had felt the life flowing out of her into Ronnie’s wound. There was ecstasy in the exchange. It made sex with her boyfriend, Lance, seem like awkward adolescent kissing.

  This notion, as she stumbled behind Ronnie, brought up two distinct thoughts for Lorraine:

  First she realized that the closeness between her and the man who had murdered her was not sexual or, maybe, it was beyond sex. And second was her boyfriend—Lance. She wondered where he’d been since she died and was brought back to life.

  How could anyone so important to her be absent during the unfolding of such a miracle?

  * * *

  WHEN THEY DESCENDED into the cluster of boulders, Ronnie thought the space there was larger than it had been before, when he’d used that landlocked grotto as a refuge.

  “Hail,” Used-to-be-Claude said in greeting. He was standing before a broad stone altar, wearing a black suit with no shirt or shoes.

  “We killed him,” Ronnie said as he dumped the lifeless form onto the granite slab.

  Used-to-be-Claude placed both hands on the dead man’s chest and stared intensely at something that was beyond death before him.

  “He has fled this form,” Used-to-be-Claude said.

  “In a dirty green light,” Ronnie agreed. “It shot off in the sky like a spaceship.”

  “You should have brought him back to me alive,” the avatar of the Silver Box said.

  “He was too powerful,” Lorraine offered. “He was killing Ronnie. I had to stop him.”

  Used-to-be-Claude’s eyes became twin nebulae as he studied the young woman. Ronnie had to look away for fear his soul would be sucked into the vastness of those orbs.

  Finally the jacketed and shirtless black man nodded. “He was filled with the energy of your rebirth, but now he has been lessened by the brutality of your attack. It will take some time for him even to be able to control another being. He would risk his own existence to attempt another reincarnation as he did with this one. You have given us a respite from his threat.”

  “What about him?” Ronnie asked of Ma Lin.

  “What you would call his soul has been fused to the body by the Laz. That way he could not escape and rob the creature of his power.”

  “Can you bring him back?” Ronnie wanted to know.

  “Why would you care?”

  “We killed him,” the young man explained. “That’s not right. He couldn’t help what he was doin’. The whole time he was tryin’ to kill us, he was yellin’ that he couldn’t help it. Maybe you could just let his soul go.”

  “I can neither release him nor can I bring him back as you did with your soul mate.”

  “Why not?”

  “For the same reason that you cannot breathe life into a gnat. My power is too great. I can, however, make his being a part of mine. In this way he can exist with me across the Immensity.”

  Upon saying this, Used-to-be-Claude laid a hand upon Ma Lin’s breast, and the hammer-handed, knife-fingered Vietnamese policeman fell into dust upon the stone altar.

  “Rest,” Used-to-be-Claude advised Ronnie and Lorraine.

  “People might have seen us carrying that body,” Lorraine countered. “They’ll send the police here looking for us.”

  “No one on Earth except you two can attain this place. It is beyond reason in the center of my random heart.”

  “A machine has a heart?” Lorraine asked.

  “We machines,” he answered, “are the final step in what humanity calls evolution. Our nature is the divinity you attribute to stars and stone idols.”

  Before either Lorraine or her killer could reply, Used-to-be-Claude disappeared, folding like a paper doll into the recesses of itself.

  * * *

  THE MORNING SUN shone redly into the crevice that was now more like a dance room floor. The stone table remained, Ma Lin’s dust heaped upon it. Lorraine and Ronnie were sprawled near each other, sleeping in the dirt. The fingers of his left and her right hand were touching.

  She awakened and sat up, stretching both arms behind her. Her waking dream was of a dead wino saying,… exist with me across the Immensity.

  Upon the face of the buff brown stone beyond the table she saw a point appear: a single black dot that was like the tapping of a conductor’s baton at the beginning of a piece of music. From this point a line moved away from her at a slight angle. This line seemed to go on and on, traveling at impossible speed past any distance she could imagine.

  Velocity, she heard, moves beyond itself into places that cannot be connected by conceptualization.

  The line was now longer and older than the space that held it. It was in itself the basis for all movement, which, in turn, instigated life or …

  Lorraine perceived the great distance as if it were something solid and still. Her soul, if indeed, she thought, a soul existed, was moving at every point on the way of a vastness that was impossible. She was, for the first time ever for any being of her genetic register, beyond herself. Words, based as they were on human experience, could not begin to articulate the contradictions of her perceptions. This impossible knowledge made her smile.

  * * *

  “LORE,” HER FATHER said from the door of her childhood bedroom. “It’s time to get up, sleepyhead. It’s time to go to school.”

  She heard these words and was instantly filled with rage; her father once again interfering with her dreams. He made her go to bed and get up and told her what classes to take and what kind of grades he expected; what kind of clothes to wear and who her friends should be.

  “Lore,” Mr. Fell said again, and in her mind Lorraine yelled, Fuck you!

  * * *

  “LORE,” RONN
IE WAS saying. He’d been shaking her shoulder for some time.

  The sun was at its apex.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “I been up for two hours,” Ronnie said, “and you been starin’ at that wall the whole time.”

  “This place is bigger,” she said, her mind still reeling itself back in from hatred and the Immensity.

  “Yeah. It’s like this place, this, this space is not here but somewhere else. We can get here because it remembers us. That’s why no one else can come in.”

  “We slept a long time,” she said.

  “Yeah, but I thought UTB-Claude said that time didn’t pass in his place.”

  “Only when he’s present.”

  “How you know that?”

  “How does anybody know anything?”

  “That’s deep.”

  “You smell like, like blood,” she said.

  “My own blood,” he agreed.

  “This is crazy,” Lorraine said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I could understand why you say that now, but I didn’t used to.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I remember you joggin’ and then buyin’ your water and fruit. I saw you a whole bunch’a times before you got close enough for me to rob you. I hated you because you just did what you wanted and was happy about it. Every place I’d ever been was like a fight about to break out and here you was walkin’ on rose petals and smilin’.”

  Lorraine put a hand against Ronnie’s cheek and they both shivered.

  “You smell like blood,” she said again. “You need some new clothes.”

  “These ones don’t fit right since you dragged me on that yellah highway no way.”

  “I’ll go buy you some more.”

  “Okay.”

  But Loraine didn’t move. Neither did Ronnie. They squatted there, facing each other, wondering about concepts and ideas that neither one of them had words for.

  “Is he making us do these things?” she asked after many minutes. “Feel these things?”

  “You mean like we’re actors in a movie, only we forgot we was?”

  She nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “I don’t think so,” Ronnie said. “I think it’s like that do’ he keep that Laz thing behind.”