Inside a Silver Box

by Walter Mosley

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s not supposed to make us do shit. Even though he’s bigger than anybody can think about he’s supposed to be like our equal and if he made us do stuff, then he’d have to get behind that do’ too.”

  “Say that again,” Lorraine commanded.

  Ronnie repeated what he’d said word for word.

  “But then why would we be here if he didn’t want that?” Lorraine asked, but she was wondering what it would be like if the Silver Box sentenced itself to exile.

  “Just like throwin’ some dice or puttin’ money on a number in the roulette wheel.”

  “Just chance?” Lorraine asked.

  “And a gamble.”

  They sat for an hour after that interchange.

  “How do you know these things?” Lorraine asked. “What makes you so sure?”

  “How does anybody know anything?” he countered.

  Lorraine nodded and smiled.

  “I hate you, you know.”

  “Yeah?” he said. “Does that bother you?”

  Lorraine’s response was to nod and stand up. “I’ll be back soon,” she said.

  NINETEEN

  FOR SOME WHILE, Ronnie wasn’t sure how long, after Lorraine had climbed out of the stone grotto, he felt the distant stirrings of restlessness. It was a long time since he’d been alone—a lifetime. Before, the person he used to be would seek out others in this mood; to fight, fuck, get high with, or just to laugh. Ronnie could laugh with almost anybody about some misery or missed opportunity.

  If I had known the mothahfuckah had ten thousand dollars in that pocket, I would have cut his mothahfuckin’ throat, he once said about a man who had just paid off a loan shark and on the way walked past Ronnie on an uptown corner.

  Girl, I need me some’a that coochie you sittin’ on, he remembered saying to a young black woman he had just met. Her name was Freya Levering.

  You at least gonna buy me some little sandwich and a soda first? Freya replied.

  Ronnie considered these memories, and many like them, feeling as if the person he had been was a close and unruly relative who’d died. The blade hand of the South Vietnamese military cop couldn’t kill him; he earned death by pouring life into the girl he’d murdered. Life was strong in the man he had been; his life was strong and he spoke the truth to everyone except maybe his mother and the cops, teachers, and marks. He would have killed anyone for ten thousand dollars. He bought Freya a pastrami sandwich and celery soda, just like she told him to.

  He lived a hard truth and a strong honesty. And now, like the Silver Box’s Laz, these realities lay dormant behind a closed door. That door, he managed to think, was what his life had been. That door was closed, and that Ronnie was dead but still alive in memory.

  He took a deep breath and looked up at the clouds. He could smell the blood on his clothes and so disrobed there in the very eye of existence.

  * * *

  LORRAINE WENT TO the used clothes store Ronnie had taken her to before. She bought him a pair of shark gray pants, a maroon square-cut shirt, and bone-colored shoes. She also got him a handsome straw hat and sunglasses.

  On her way back, she was feeling the jitters in her fast legs. She wanted to run but at the same time she was enjoying making herself walk at a normal, slow pace.

  “Hey, mama, you got a nice piece’a ass for a white girl,” someone said.

  Lorraine stopped and turned to see who had addressed her. She was thinking that four weeks ago, such an intrusion would have frightened her.

  “What?” she asked.

  He was a well-built dark-skinned young man with his shirt open, showing the musculature of his chest and stomach. When he stood up from the park bench, Lorraine saw that he was tall and long limbed. She felt a sexual response like when she was with Ronnie, but he was unwilling, maybe unable, to be with her.

  Ronnie’s like my brother, she thought, only closer. Too close for that.

  “I said you got a fine ass,” the young man said. “I could hit on that so good, you’d leave all your white boyfriends.”

  “I already left him,” she said.

  “Then how ’bout givin’ me a chance?” he asked with a leer.

  “You want my pussy?”

  The young man’s eyes lit up and he smiled. “That’s right.”

  “Right here in the park?”

  “Anywhere I could get it.”

  Lorraine paused for a moment, pretending to consider the brash youth’s desire.

  “You know,” she said, “I just don’t give this pussy out to any wanna-be, bare-chested Romeo hanging out in the park with no job and no chances.”

  She wondered if these words had passed into her from Ronnie.

  “I gotta job,” the young man claimed. “Work at the Sandford Hotel in the kitchen.”

  “Okay,” Lorraine said. “I’ll tell you what.”

  “What’s that, baby?” The young man moved close but Lorraine held out a hand, keeping him at a two-foot distance.

  “You stay right where you’re standing and I will walk six steps away. Then, when you say go, we both start running. If you catch me, you can have me wherever you want—in the middle of the path, behind some bushes, or up in one’a your girlfriends’ beds.”

  Lorraine felt the nameless lothario’s smile yawning in her womb.

  She took the six steps and looked at him, waiting.

  The young man leapt forward, reaching for her, and yelled, “Go!” He almost caught her but Lorraine was two paces ahead—and building up speed.

  They ran and ran and ran. Lorraine felt the race in her legs and her heart. She was laughing and running, always just out of reach of the young man. If he speeded up, she did too. When he slowed she turned down the heat so that he would think that she wanted to get caught.

  “What’s your name?” she called back on a desolate dirt path through the trees.

  “Big Dick!” he yelled hoarsely. “What’s yours?”

  “Almost Big Dick’s Pussy,” she called, and then put twenty paces between them.

  He roared in frustration and ran faster.

  Lorraine imagined that she could feel his heart pounding after her. She thought that if she kept just out of reach, he might run until that beating heart burst. She didn’t want him to die, but the thought of him running until he was on the ground, defeated by his desire for her, made her laugh and run harder—all the while, clutching the bundle of Ronnie’s clothes to her breast.

  The race became its own creature in Lorraine’s heart and mind. For a while there, she forgot about her pursuer. There was just her fleet gait and the sun and the air across her face.

  When she remembered and gave a backwards glance, he was gone. She stopped but he didn’t jump out from behind some bush or come into view on the path she’d run. She surveyed the walkway and surrounding park to make sure she had won. Reveling in her victory, she thought that one day she might let some man catch her. But until then she’d outrun every suitor she met.

  This was her own private fairy tale, somewhere between the Grimm brothers and Dr. Seuss.

  * * *

  WHEN RONNIE HAD disrobed, he noticed water beginning to trickle from the top of one of the stone faces. The boulder seemed taller than before. The water increased its flow until it became a small waterfall come there to wash away the blood.

  The cascading water was bracing, but more than that it was vibrant like a living thing; whispering in a language unknown to Ronnie and laughing at his attempts to understand.

  It was, Ronnie thought, like a water spirit sprung from the earth, wanting to play with the little brown mortal man home from one of his silly wars. Miss Peters had read to him about nymphs, sylphs, and elemental spirits when he stayed in from recess and lunch. He wondered if she was still at his old school; then he asked himself why he never thought to look for her before.

  “You got a nice piece’a ass, Ron-Ron.” She was standing there behind him, still holding the parcel o
f clothes.

  When he stepped out from under the playful waterfall, the cascade faltered and then stopped.

  “It just came out of nowhere,” Ronnie explained.

  “Uh-huh,” Lorraine said, throwing the package on the ground. “You’ll have to dry off before trying on these clothes.”

  He settled into Half Lotus on a yellow rock cleaned off by the water. She squatted down in front of him, gazing at his features.

  Lorraine felt good from her run. She felt even stronger in close proximity to the naked young man. Looking at him she sneered, unable to separate her power from disdain.

  “This guy was chasing me through the park,” she said.

  “He wanted to rob you?”

  “No. He wanted to fuck.”

  “Fuck?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Did you used to use that word?”

  “Fuck?” she asked. “Sure I did. But that was when it was like I’d get in trouble for saying things or doing them. It was like walking down that yellow road when there was a whole forest that we could explore. You put a road in front of somebody and they just follow, like sheep or ants. That road could be anything. It could be cursing or not cursing, Christianity or capitalism. It could lead you like a lamb to the slaughter but you just keep on walking.”

  “But all you have to do is die and then come back to life to know that that road don’t go where you goin’,” Ronnie said.

  “I should hate you all the time,” Lorraine interjected. “Why don’t I?”

  “Maybe it’s like a new path like those ants travel,” Ronnie speculated. “Maybe we’re like enemy pirates in the only lifeboat out on the ocean.”

  Lorraine smiled and reached out to touch her friend’s face. On contact they shivered again.

  “But the real question is why somebody as big and powerful as the Silver Box would need us at all,” she said.

  “I can answer that,” said a new voice from the direction of the stone table.

  TWENTY

  STANDING ATOP THE stone altar, risen from the ashes of Ma Lin, was a young ochre-colored Asian man. He wore a white short-sleeved dress shirt over a white T-shirt, no tie, black pants with no belt, and white socks and black shoes tied by laces threaded through three rows of eyes. His hands had returned to their normal state.

  Lorraine thought to herself, This is the memory of Ma Lin made real. Or maybe this thought was information gleaned from another source external to her mind.

  Suddenly aware of his nakedness, Ronnie picked up the package Lorraine had brought. While he dressed she stood between him and their guest.

  The once-Vietnamese, once human, now merely a personification, smiled at the tender gesture of girl and boy. This, he knew, was not his smile but the grin of the celestial being that brought him here from death.

  “What do you mean you have the answer?” Lorraine asked of Ma Lin.

  “I have been in the center with a tall black man who died right here.”

  “Used-to-be-Claude Festerling,” Ronnie said. He had donned the newly bought used pants and shirt and moved to stand next to his companion.

  “He spoke my native tongue,” Ma Lin said. “Was he a veteran?”

  Neither Lorraine nor Ronnie had an answer to this question and so did not give one.

  “The Laz is like a disease,” Ma Lin said. “Diseases as you may know are cells and living molecules that exist in a sort of counterbalance with other living cells. A disease cell couples with a healthy one and then replicates itself billions of times until the host organism is in jeopardy of failure. Biologic beings such as you and I suffer from these organisms but there are also diseases that infest the pure logic of machines.”

  “So you sayin’ that if the thing that was in you grabs on to any part of Silver Box, then he’ll grow and grow until Silver Box dies?” Ronnie asked.

  Ma Lin looked up for a moment and then gestured for Ronnie to hold that question. The white-shirted Vietnamese man then went into a recess behind the boulder that contained the water spirit. A moment later he was back, carrying three straight-backed, bright red chairs.

  “The Deity wants us to be comfortable,” he said. He set the chairs so that they faced each other and gestured for the two friends to sit.

  When they were settled in the broadening space beneath a generous sun, Lorraine asked, “If he can do all this, why can’t he just kill that thing?”

  “He can, of course,” Ma Lin proclaimed. “After all, he is God. But his power is so great that in destroying the disease, he would decimate the host. Your planet—Earth.”

  “Not yours?” Ronnie asked.

  “I am who I was, but that man is no longer who I am,” Ma Lin replied with a smile.

  “I feel like that too,” Ronnie said, “like the man I used to be is behind me.”

  “The man I used to be is dead,” Ma Lin amended. “The actions of his life are what you might read in a history book or even have seen in a movie that you forgot you watched.”

  “Like Claude?” Lorraine asked.

  “No,” Ma Lin said, shaking his head sadly. “He was dead already, his soul fled, when the Deity found him. The man you call Claude is merely a simulacrum, where my soul is still intact and yet, at the same time, a clean slate.”

  “But if you’re callin’ the Silver Box, God, then why couldn’t he call back Claude’s soul into his body?” Ronnie asked.

  “We are not here to discuss metaphysics,” the young-looking Vietnamese man said. “Leave it at the fact that there are limits, self-imposed or not, throughout the universe we live in. If this were not the case, God would be bored to death.”

  “If the Laz don’t get him first,” Ronnie added.

  “I’m sorry I got you killed,” Lorraine said to Ma Lin. “I had no idea that would happen.”

  “In life I was an unhappy man,” he said, forgiving murder with seven words. “I had killed many people and then it was, in the end, all for naught—like slaughtering a flock of sheep and then leaving their bodies to rot in the sun. You have blessed me with divinity and dispelled the guilt I lived with.”

  “Cool,” Ronnie said. “So do you have a message from your God?”

  “Yes. He has given you certain tools—”

  “Uh-huh,” Ronnie interrupted. “I’m a lot stronger and she’s pretty fast.”

  “Those are mere adornments,” Ma Lin said. “Strength and speed complement each other, as do race and gender, in a more parochial sense, but the real abilities you possess have to do with perception and unity. You, Lorraine Fell, have always questioned existence. Now you can see what is real. Ronnie Bottoms, you who have always been a man of decision and action now you see what is empty, what is not there. And together you can heal and succor each other. Together you can overcome odds greater than your sum because your wills are unassailable when you face the world as one.”

  “But he murdered me,” she said.

  “He also gave you life,” Ma Lin replied.

  “I don’t understand any’a this,” Ronnie added.

  “And yet you are committed.”

  “Why are you here with us?” Lorraine asked, her heart still bubbling with hatred. But when she glanced at Ronnie, this feeling subsided.

  “The Deity sends me,” Ma Lin said, unable to suppress a beatific smile. “He wants me to tell you that you did well defeating for a time that which lived in me. He says that the Laz will have to recover from the drubbing you gave it before it can safely inhabit a new host. It will need many weeks, maybe even as much as a year to recuperate enough to be able to bend this world to its designs. You must find it before that time and bring it here, bound and blinded, to the one place the Deity exists on this Earth.”

  “Literally blinded?” Lorraine asked.

  “At least with its eyes covered.”

  “Can it take over anybody like Lore did with you?” asked Ronnie Bottoms.

  “Any life-form,” Ma Lin agreed. “It could merge with the being of machines
also, but the Laz have a distaste for the potentially divine, preferring the inferior atmosphere of biology to the exquisite perfection of mechanical design.”

  “You think machines are better than people?” Ronnie asked.

  “Superior,” Ma Lin corrected. “Machines, as you call them, are pure and pristine like starlight mathematics, whereas organic life is little better than an avalanche tumbling and rolling down randomly, thoughts all jumbled and true purpose a rare notion.”

  “If that’s so, why don’t old Silver Box send out a flashlight to find that Laz dude?” Ronnie asked. “What he need us for?”

  Lorraine giggled.

  Ma Lin sneered and said, “Why do farmers use pigs and dogs to find truffles in the dirt? Everything has a purpose within the hierarchy of existence.”

  “So then you low man on the totem pole, huh?” Ronnie said, parroting the words of a man who might have been his father; a man who’d died before the boy’s sweat had smell.

  “I have been blessed by something greater than I am,” Ma Lin said. “You have too.”

  “Go away,” Lorraine said to their visitor. “Tell Used-to-be-Claude that we’ll find this thing and bring it to him if we can.”

  “If you cannot, the avalanche will cease,” Ma Lin said, his tone implying that this prospect might not be such a bad thing.

  The slaughtered and resurrected Vietnamese stood and picked up his chair. He walked into the crevice behind a boulder that had been a waterfall and did not return.

  * * *

  FOR A WHILE after Ma Lin was gone, Ronnie and Lorraine were quiet, thoughtful. The young man sat on his red chair, trying to remember what his mother’s old boyfriend looked like.

  What was his name again?

  Lorraine had risen to her feet and was pacing around the inner space that was now the size of a baseball diamond. After a time her pacing turned into a jog around the perimeter of the roofless room.

  She was aware of him in the periphery of her vision. He saw her pass again and again.

  When finally he stood, she stopped and approached him.

  “Why do you think he took that chair with him?” Ronnie asked.