“That you did,” Ronnie agreed, quoting another nameless man who might have been his father. That one hadn’t died—as far as Ronnie knew.
“I have to go apologize.” Lance took a step toward the door Lorraine had gone through, but Ronnie detained him by laying a hand on his arm.
“She mad right now, blood. Call her up later tonight and tell her when she cools down.”
Pulling away from the hand, Lance said, “Are you fucking her?”
“If I was,” Ronnie said softly, “you’d be one dead mothahfuckah aftah hittin’ my woman. We just friends, man. Now, go on, get outta here and let her calm down.”
Lance looked at the closed door through which his just-now ex-girlfriend had passed. A dark bruise was rising on the left side of his face, just under the cheekbone.
“I’ll tell her to call you in two hours,” Ronnie added. “I promise.”
Looking at the young man staring at the closed door, Ronnie could almost see the hope of love fading. He felt bereft for this loss.
“She been through some shit, man,” Ronnie said. “You got to let her get it together before she can talk to you.”
There was an infinity of sympathy inside the black youth’s mind. It was as if, he thought, while Lorraine’s body had died, he had come into the mix with a dead soul but then as some kind of celestial backwash to the resurrection, he had been granted a new life too.
* * *
A MINUTE AFTER Ronnie closed the door on Lance, Lorraine came out.
“I hurt my hand,” she said in a vulnerable tone.
The hand was swollen to half again its size. Ronnie reached out to hold the bruised extremity with both his hands. As he closed his fingers around the injury, she and he felt something like a cold bracing wind blow over them.
“Damn,” Lorraine said. “It’s better than sex. All you have to do is touch it and the pain is gone.”
TWENTY-THREE
THEY ORDERED TWO pizzas: one everything-vegetarian and the other everything-meat. Lorraine ate all of hers and most of Ronnie’s. It was late and they were sitting side by side on the blue sofa facing the picture window. Every light in the condo was on and so all they saw were nighttime city lights behind their own reflections.
“There’s no time,” Lorraine was saying.
“There ain’t nuthin’ but time.”
“I mean between things,” she argued. “I died, hunted you down, and came back to life all in what felt like just minutes. Then I came home and sent Lance away without even giving him a chance to discuss it. We’ve been together for two years, and I just sent him away like he was a one-night stand or something.”
At Ronnie’s behest she had called her ex two hours after he left. Lance asked her to give him another chance but she said no. She told him that they would pack up his things and leave them at the front desk. He asked if he could call and again she said no.
“That’s how regular people live,” Ronnie said. “People that’s got a job and apartment. People that go to work in the mornin’ and come home at night. If you like that the most important thing you got is a boyfriend or girlfriend, maybe some kids call you mama. But we ain’t polite or civilized or whatever. We been all the way in the shit. I mean, I thought I had seen somethin’ before I killed you. I thought I knew what was happenin’. I couldn’t control it but I could roll with the punches if you know what I mean. I can see that all your chairs look the same even if they cut from different wood, but I don’t have time to talk about it. Even just sittin’ here, I know that that Laz thing is gonna be lookin’ for us. He’d cut out both our hearts an’ eat ’em just to find out where that Silver Box is at.”
“We have to find him,” Lorraine agreed.
“So who got time to worry ’bout Lance’s feelin’s? He’s just lucky you didn’t kill him.”
“I almost did, right?”
“You got a temper on you, girl. You do. We don’t have time for that neither. I mean he shouldn’t’a slapped you, but killin’ him just add to our problems.”
“Is that why you saved his life, because you didn’t want the grief of an investigation?”
“No.” Ronnie stared into her blue and brown eyes with his green and brown ones.
“Let’s go to bed,” she said, holding out a welcoming hand.
“I’ll sleep out here on the sofa.”
“Why?”
“Just to be alone for a while.”
“What if I get scared in the night?”
“You know where I’ll be.”
* * *
WITH LIGHTS OUT in the apartment, the glow of night shone in the broad window. Ronnie showered in the guest bathroom and, wearing only his trousers, he lay back on the sofa, wondering why he had never before paid attention to the details of his life; the people he’d known. Freya, Miss Peters, the men who might have been his father … These faces filled his mind.
Lying there, Ronnie imagined his adult life as a dead man moving but unaware of the places he’d been. That’s how his life had been before Lorraine tried to kill him but gave him awareness instead.
The feeling he had while drifting into sleep was that of an unmoored canoe at the water’s edge being pulled by a tide toward an immense body of water. Ronnie had once seen this enormous stretch of the Atlantic from the Verrazano Bridge when he and his best friend that month, Bobo, had jacked a car in Staten Island. He had seen it, but now, in the dream, he was floating out there under moonshine, the radiance of which had a sound like tinkling crystals in a distant, windblown chandelier.
The music and light danced in Ronnie’s heart like drunken hillbillies doing a jig to fiddle music that Ronnie sometimes, secretly, listened to. He liked the high laughing whine of the violin and the insectlike twanging of the banjo.
The light, music, dance, and the gentle swell of the tide lulled Ronnie into a rest that was complete for one of the few times in his memory.
He grunted with the satisfaction and imagined what bears felt just before their months-long sleep that Miss Peters called hibernation.
* * *
WITH HER LEFT palm on top of her head and the right hand gripping her crotch, Lorraine closed her eyes, bending forward, bringing her face to within only a few inches of her thighs. She dreaded this moment as much as the memory of her death at the hands of Ronnie Bottoms. Sleep was a stalker secreted in the crevices of her brain, a predator waiting for her to drop her defenses.
Trying to think of peaceful times and beautiful panoramas, she saw only Lance Figueroa wilting under her right-handed blows, Ma Lin’s skull caving in as she hit him again and again, and Ronnie Bottoms’s life flowing out from his arm until he was almost, almost dead.…
Coming together, these images ignited in her mind, causing an explosion the consequence of which was unconsciousness rather than sleep.
From the center of this oblivion, Lorraine found herself hurtling upward—through the ceiling and cityscape and clouds like a suicide falling up instead of down. She was plunging toward the ceiling of the sky—thielo rasa, the words went through her mind. And then, just before the crash, she veered into a curve traveling faster and faster, screaming without sound.
* * *
LORRAINE SLID IN behind him on the sofa. She was naked, he could feel that.
“Don’t send me away,” she whispered.
“What’s wrong?”
“When I fall asleep my mind jumps up out of my body and goes way way up until I’m high above the clouds. Then I start going around the world so fast until I can’t see anything. I get dizzy and sick but the only way to stop is waking up again.”
“Your mind leaves your body?” Ronnie asked. “Like when you were dead?”
“Yes,” she said, her tone heralding the dawn of understanding.
“So you think if I’m here, I could hold you down?”
“Please.”
Ronnie could feel the sensation of bodiless flight emanating from her torso. It was the opposite of the gentle waters of his d
reams.
“I might could slow you down,” he said. “But I don’t think I can stop it.”
“Let’s see what happens.”
“Okay.”
* * *
RONNIE CAME AWAKE floating over late night Fifth Avenue. There wasn’t much traffic and no sound at all. The sensation was that of being carried in a net by a thousand helium-filled balloons. Miss Peters had told him about the big gas-filled and hot-air balloons that early aviators had designed. At night he’d dreamed about them as a child.
Is this what you felt before? His question was thought because he had no mouth, lips, or vocal cords.
No.
You was movin’ faster?
Uh-huh, Lorraine’s spirit replied. And much much higher. Almost in space.
The spirit balloon that the two hung from floated slowly downtown until they had reached the work site of the new World Trade Center building. Dangling there, near the top of the unfinished structure, they came across a sobbing, babbling man.
“I never meant to hurt her,” he muttered, salty tears rolling over his gabbling lips. “I was just mad. I was always mad.”
The man hit himself in the face with both fists. He repeated this battering five or six times until blood mingled with the tears on his face.
Why he doin’ that? Ronnie wondered. An’ why we here watchin’?
Try to reach out and grab on to him, Lorraine directed.
I ain’t got no hands to grab with.
Just try.
Ronnie closed non existent eyes and imagined that he was going to grab the security guard by his shirt. The next thing he knew, he was face-to-face with the blubbering, bleeding, middle-aged white man.
“Huh?” the worker—his name was Cosmo—grunted. “Who’s there?”
It works! Ronnie thought loudly.
Hold on, Lorraine said, I’m going to get in his head.
How?
I just will.
There was a shift in perceptions shared between Ronnie and Lorraine. For her it was like the buffeted feeling she’d get just before falling asleep, and for him it was the sudden bright impact of hot crack fumes entering his brain.
It was daytime, brilliant and peaceful. All around they could see rolling green hills. There was a plain-looking white woman, barely in her twenties, standing next to them, looking up into their eyes. But she wasn’t seeing the white woman and black man, no. She—her name they knew was Madeline—was looking at Cosmo and crying.
“I’ll kill myself,” she vowed.
“I don’t give a fuck,” was his reply. His voice was young and brutal. “I told you, it’s not my baby.”
“I’m not a whore.”
“Braynard said he fucked you.”
The words stabbed at Madeline. She turned and ran away from the doubtful lover. While running she fell twice only to rise again, howling from a pain that was deeper than any bruise.
There came a loud cracking sound and then the trio in Cosmo’s mind found themselves in a closet where there was no light but they could see anyway. Madeline was hanging by a store-bought hemp rope from a high beam near the ceiling. There were moths fluttering around her purple, swollen face. Somewhere beyond the closet door, a woman was calling, “Maddy? Maddy, are you up here?”
This last image, both Lorraine and Ronnie knew, was the product of Cosmo’s imagination, a patchwork of stories that the bereaved man had heard and imagined.
Can you climb up here? Lorraine asked her ethereal passenger.
Ronnie was about to complain but before the words could form in his mind, he found himself in a close space that was dark green and shadow gray. Beside him was a tall fountain of light that was in glaring contrast to the constricting and dark atmosphere.
Lore?
Look over there. The fountain pulsed with energy as these words boomed inside Ronnie. And though there was no indication or even a possibility of direction, he saw a thin circle of glittering red light embedded in the gray green morass. Oozing from this fiery brand were droplets that were darker by far than the dim space they had invaded. These leaking tears of blackness brought with them a depth of despair that caused a shivering around Ronnie’s bodiless consciousness.
It’s why he’s so sad, Lorraine intoned. It’s a wound in his psyche, an infection inside another disease.
We have to close it, Ronnie responded. That’s why we’re here.
The agreement between them was wordless. They both felt for the first time communication without the clutter of words and ideas based on symbols and inelegant physical imagery.
Agreement in place, they floated as one toward the thin circle of infection, surrounding it with the united conception of their mind. Their mind—this concept seemed natural. It was something Used-to-be-Claude’s creator bound them with. Or maybe they were bound by Ronnie’s crime and Lorraine’s refusal to accept her death.…
The red circle burned them but their will pressed upon it. The ocean of Ronnie’s sleep and the velocity of Lorraine’s orbit created a sense of gravity that crushed the infection like a water glass shattered by a constricting fist.
Ronnie laughed at the pain of burning.
It is marking us! Lorraine warned.
“Maddy, I’m so sorry,” cried the hundredth-floor midnight security guard. He uttered these words and then forgot what he’d been thinking; not about Maddy, not what he’d done but these events took on a faraway feeling, and his despair lessened.
Then a sudden vacuum seemed to extinguish all light and sound, hope and being.
TWENTY-FOUR
AND IT WAS morning.
Light peeked in through the picture window, over the crest of the far blue sofa. Lorraine’s cheek lay against Ronnie’s dark and brawny back. His skin smelled faintly like buttermilk. She caressed his left shoulder blade with the palm of her left hand.
“You awake?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t think I ever slept so well in my entire life.”
“Was that a dream?” he replied.
“I don’t think so. We were really there but it wasn’t any place that human beings have ever been.”
“And so we helped that man?”
“We closed off the wound in his soul.”
They climbed off the sofa and stood before each other; she was completely naked and he wore only the loose, secondhand pants.
“You have an erection,” she noted blandly.
“Got to pee.”
“Me too. Go on, I’ll meet you in the kitchen.”
* * *
RONNIE WAS BOILING water for tea when Lorraine entered the kitchen wearing a bright red and yellow kimono. He hadn’t made tea for many years, since he was a boy and he used to get up early to make English breakfast with honey for his mother, Elsinore. Elsie loved it when he brought her tea in bed.
My little cherub, she’d say.
“You drink tea?” Lorraine asked his back.
“No, not really.”
“Then why are you making it?”
“For you,” he said, turning.
“You’re smiling, Mr. Bottoms.”
“Am I?”
She giggled, taking the green mug and tea bag he’d found on the shelf. He poured the hot water, reexperiencing one of the fondest moments of his childhood.
“Let’s sit over by the window,” she suggested.
In a nook room at the top of the kitchen corridor, there stood a clear plastic table with chairs of the same material looking down on the busy side street of the workday New York morning.
“Aren’t you having anything, Ronnie? There’s usually some good granola in the red jar.”
“Not hungry.”
“You want to try some tea? There might be juice in the fridge.”
Ronnie shook his head. “You haven’t been here in three weeks,” he said. “How you got fresh food?”
“Nova,” she stated simply.
“What?”
“My parents’ housekeeper.
She comes here every Thursday, cleans the house, and does my shopping. She wouldn’t miss a Thursday unless they found my body and put it in the ground.”
Lorraine finished her tea, got a big bowl from under the sink, and filled that with granola and cream. Then she got a soupspoon and ate the huge breakfast loudly and with obvious relish.
Ronnie watched her lusty repast, marveling at how peaceful he felt in the face of passionate hunger.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“You always eat like that?”
“Never,” she said, shaking her head while chewing with her mouth open. “I was always on a diet until I died. Now I want and eat and fuck and beat on just about everything I see.”
“Damn. You sound like me before—” He stopped in mid-sentence, feeling shame for maybe the first time in his adult life.
“What did it feel like,” she asked, “to pour out your insides to make me live?”
“Like a mother must feel when she make a baby. From havin’ sex all the way up to givin’ birth. Like my eyes and my ears, my skin and brain went into someplace brighter and stronger and louder than you could believe.”
“And so have you changed as much as I have?”
Ronnie heard the question, allowed it to seep into his mind and his body. After a long minute, he said, “It’s like when I was a child, I was simple and happy and wonderin’ about what things was. And then people started dumpin’ shit on top’a me. Shovelin’ it on like I wasn’t even there or they wanted me gone. After a while, my whole life was shit. There wasn’t no way outta that. And then, when you brought me and Ma Lin back to the park, it was like somebody turned on a fire hose and washed all that shit away.
“So if you askin’ if I’m different, I’d have to say no, I’m not. But it’s just that all the shit I had to swim in is gone, so it don’t look like me no more. It don’t feel like me neither, but I know that it is.”
Lorraine finished the mixing bowl of granola, filled it again, and finished that off. Ronnie watched her, and neither of them spoke.
“What do you think we should do?” Lorraine asked after taking a grapefruit from the refrigerator.
“Maybe we should go our different ways for the day and meet back up here tonight.”
Inside a Silver Box Page 11
