Inside a Silver Box

by Walter Mosley

  “What if you were with the both of us together?”

  “If we were not within my earthly stronghold, I would shine like a nova star. The Laz is orbiting the globe, dipping down now and then into those souls that it might corrupt. It’s looking for a host to defeat you with.”

  “Can you tell us where it’s at?”

  “I cannot see.”

  “But that’s what made Cosmo so sad about breakin’ that girl’s heart?”

  Used-to-be-Claude nodded and clasped his hands. “I do not wish to destroy this world, Ronnie Bottoms. You and Lorraine Fell must find the Laz and bring it to me. You must bind him and blind him and make him helpless. Then I will do what I must.”

  Used-to-be-Claude got to his feet and Ronnie stood also.

  “You got it, brother” Ronnie said, extending a hand.

  Instead of returning the gesture, Used-to-be-Claude hopped backwards almost to the olive wall, making sure to avoid contact.

  “What?” Ronnie asked.

  At that moment, the door to the green room came open, Used-to-be-Claude evaporated in a silent puff of multicolored mist, and for a moment Ronnie thought he saw the double of the red ring that had infected the lingering disease of Cosmo’s perfidy.

  Ronnie turned to the door to see a tallish white woman in a gray dress suit and yellow-rimmed glasses.

  “Ronnie?” the woman said.

  The hem of her dress was down below the knee and there was one big pocket on her left thigh. And though her hair had more gray to it, her face didn’t look any different. This amazed the young man. It had to be at least seventeen years since he’d last seen her.

  “Miss Peters?”

  “How are you?” The teacher walked right up and put her arms around him.

  Used-to-be-Claude out of mind, Ronnie remembered that Miss Peters would always hug him when they were alone during recess or lunch. She’d do that until he calmed down and then tell him stories or show him how to use art tools.

  “Come sit,” she said. “Come.”

  She took him by the arm and sat as he did.

  She was holding his right hand with both of hers.

  “How have you been?” she asked.

  “All ovah the place really,” he said, feeling the words flow easily, “in trouble a lot but I think that’s mostly ovah now. I been in and outta jail and my mama died—”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that. Your mother was a lovely woman.”

  “You knew my mama?”

  “She would come by every Thursday afternoon and we’d talk about you.”

  “You mean me and Tiffany and Myron.”

  “Sometimes we’d talk about your brother and sister, but mostly it was just you.”

  “Really?”

  Shona Peters had a heart-shaped face and a small mouth but thick lips. Her skin color was cream and her eyes doe brown.

  “What happened to your eye?” she asked.

  “I got an infection when I was in jail.”

  “But you’re out of that now.”

  It was then that Ronnie recalled that he had an afternoon appointment with his parole officer that day.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Why did you come here?” Miss Peters asked. “Do you need anything?”

  “No. I got money and a place to live and all. I guess because I got time to think now, I was tryin’ to remember what was good in my life. All I could think of was my mama and you. She really used to come here?”

  “Every week she would. We talked about how hard it was for you to concentrate on any one thing for very long. She told me what a loving son you were, about how you made her morning tea at least three times a week.”

  “I remember that too. I also remember about the myths and the stars and how ants know each other by smell. You said that all bees was girl bees except when the queen needed to mate—”

  Shona placed the palm of her right hand against the grown man’s cheek and he began to weep. There was no sound or gasping, just a flow of tears for something both lost and found.

  That was how Freya found them when she entered the green room twenty minutes later.

  “You told me to tell you when it was eleven,” she said to Miss Peters.

  “Do you need me to stay?” Miss Peters asked Ronnie.

  “I could sit here wit’ you for a whole mont’,” Ronnie replied, unashamed of his tears.

  In his mind he likened the weeping to the living waterfall in the Silver Box’s Central Park fortress. It also brought to mind the times when Mr. Charles Burns would hose down the sidewalk in front of the old 156th Street apartment that Ronnie had lived in with his mother, brother, and sister. It felt good to see the dirt washed up from between the cracks and crevices and flushed into the gutter. Now and then Charles Burns would let Ronnie hold the hose, showing him how to make a spray by covering half its mouth with his tiny thumb. The pressure of the water tickled.

  Miss Peters was looking at him, patient with his wandering mind as she had always been.

  “But I got to go too,” Ronnie said at last.

  “Shall we stand up, then?” Miss Peters suggested.

  That was how she got him ready when recess was over. He wanted her all to himself but when she said those words, he knew that he’d have to go back to his desk and wait for the other kids.

  “Freya will see you to the exit,” the elementary school teacher said at the green door.

  “Miss Peters?”

  “Yes, Ronnie?”

  “I got a ’partment down on Fifth Avenue with a roommate. You wanna come down sometime and have dinner with us?”

  “Let me see your arm,” the teacher said.

  Obediently Ronnie stuck out his left hand with the palm up. Shona Peters took out a blue ink pen from the big pocket in her dress and wrote a ten-digit number on his inner forearm.

  “That’s how you used to remind me about my home homework,” he said in revelation. “You’d write it on my arm and when Mama asked me if I had studies and I said no, she’d tell me to ask my arm if that was true.”

  The teacher kissed his cheek and said, “Freya will take you.”

  As she was walking away, Ronnie wanted to yell something but he didn’t think it was right.

  * * *

  “YOU REALLY GOT an apartment on Fifth Avenue?” Freya asked him on the granite front stairs of the school.

  “Uh-huh.” He was running his fingers lightly across the phone number on his written-upon arm.

  “Are you gonna ask me ovah for some dinner?”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ONLY MINUTES AFTER she left Ronnie, Lorraine had made her way to the pedestrian path that ran along the Hudson River and went all the way up to the George Washington Bridge. From there she headed inland and through a large park she’d found.

  She wasn’t going very fast, just like a sprinter in a hundred-meter race. For her this pace felt like an easy jog. She speeded up when crossing at red lights or to avoid collisions with slow-moving pedestrians or cars. The run wasn’t so fast or satisfying as it had been on the yellow dirt path but it was enough to take the edge off the tension she had been feeling in her thighs.

  She came to a halt at a lonely bus stop where a young bespectacled white man was sitting reading a hardback book. An older black woman was seated on the other end of the bench.

  Lorraine stood over the young man and looked down on him. He was thin and his shaggy brown hair had grown over his ears. He didn’t notice the runner.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He looked up, squinting from the bright sun behind her. “Hi.”

  “Can I sit with you?”

  “Sure. It’s a public bench.”

  She sat close enough that her left thigh was pressing up against his right. He made the motion of moving over, but he was already at the edge of the bench.

  “What you reading?”

  “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

  “Critics called it magic realism, but García Márq
uez says that every word is true,” she said. “I like it when God calls down for the beautiful young maiden to float up to heaven.”

  “You read it?”

  “Could you help me?” she replied.

  “Wha-what?”

  “I need a boy to kiss me a little bit.”

  “Huh?”

  “We could go over in that alley over there. That way if the bus comes, you could still make it.”

  The older black woman was staring as the newly met young couple walked into the deserted brick and concrete alley.

  There was a black door a third of the way down the lane. It was set in a foot or so and Lorraine pushed him against it.

  When she kissed him, it was with her entire body: shoulders and breasts, pelvis and thighs—not to mention her lips and tongue.

  The young man—she found out later that his name was Alton—had never felt passion like this from a woman. His girlfriend of three years, Christine, didn’t like kissing. She had read somewhere that there were always crumbs of food in peoples’ mouths, and after that, kissing always felt dirty.

  Lorraine enjoyed swabbing her tongue around and under his tongue and between his teeth and lips. She reveled in the little sighs and grunts of surprise and pleasure that came from him. When she put her hand down the front of his jeans, he froze.

  “Calm down,” she said. “Nobody can see.”

  She pushed his shoulder back with her left hand while with her right she moved up and down at an impossible rate while making sure not to hold the erection too tightly. She watched his face contort.

  He tried to grope under her dress but she said, “No. I’m doing you,” and he stopped.

  When he started to make a gasping cry, she whispered, “The bus is coming. Do you want me to stop?”

  “No, no, no, no,” he said, each syllable punctuating a pulse of his orgasm.

  Lorraine smiled and held tight to Alton’s erection. His eyes opened wide, trying to see as much of this strange young woman as he could.

  “Okay,” she said. “You got to brace yourself, ’cause I’m gonna do it again.”

  * * *

  A WHILE LATER they were sitting at the bus stop. The older black woman had taken the bus. Alton was holding the book and trying to think of something to say to the olive-skinned blond-haired girl with the multicolored eyes.

  “If you want more than that,” she said after a while, “you can come with me to another bench down from my parents’ condo on the Upper East Side. If you wait while I’m up there arguing with them, I’ll take you home afterwards and fuck your brains out.”

  Lorraine heard these words coming from her lips, knew that it was her on that bench next to the egghead commuter, but she didn’t feel like herself. Her death and revivification had left her with what felt like an open heart—vulnerable to every passion and willing—no, compelled—to act on whatever it was she felt.

  Before her encounter with Ronnie Bottoms and the Silver Box, Lorraine had made the time to read a book almost every day. If she did not have the time to read, she got nervous and sad. But after her death, she had no interest in the written word or thoughts that not did not lead to sensual expression.

  * * *

  “MISS LORRAINE!” NOVA Triphammer-Louise exclaimed at the front door of the Fell condo.

  “Miss Nova,” Lorraine replied as was their ritual.

  “Girl, you look too skinny and what happened with your eyes?”

  “I’ve actually gained weight,” Loraine said as she walked into the vestibule and then down the long hallway toward the sitting room. “And I was sick. A doctor told me that this sometimes happens when people get certain infections.”

  “But you’re okay now,” the lifetime housekeeper said.

  “Never been better or clearer or happier.”

  They had reached the large sitting room, which was replete with a white and blue marble bar, a picture window looking onto a terrace that hovered above the East River, original oils that were insured for ten million dollars, and a teak worktable that Lorraine, her parents, and her brother, Damian, worked at when she was young.

  Mr. Patrick Fell was tall and dashing except for his pale complexion. He played tennis, golf, and rode horses in jumping competitions from Connecticut to Virginia. His blond hair was seeded now with gray but he looked forty rather than fifty. His usual smile was missing, but other than that he was as he had always been.

  Mrs. Alora Teeman-Fell was also tall and slender. She played tennis doubles with her husband and ran three miles a day. She was a vegetarian except when her mother came from Columbus to visit, and aloof, though Lorraine was always sure of her love.

  “We expected you sooner than this,” Mr. Fell said to his daughter.

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Let’s sit down,” Mr. Fell said.

  Obediently Alora went to a chair at the near end of the long table, lowering onto it with exceptional poise.

  Lorraine had always felt awkward in the presence of her mother.

  “I’d rather stand,” Lorraine said. She was feeling the tension of this meeting in her legs.

  “I said, sit down.”

  “No.”

  “This is my house, Lore.”

  “And this is my ass, Dad. I will remain standing.”

  “Lorraine!” Alora Teeman-Fell complained.

  “No, Mom. No. I came here because I knew you’d be upset. I want to talk to you about it, but I will not be bullied.”

  “I’m not bullying you,” her father said, holding up a finger that was both instructional and threatening.

  “Then don’t tell me when to sit like I’m some kind of fucking dog.”

  Lorraine was continually surprised by her own quick temper. She’d almost killed Lance. She had killed Ma Lin. All her manners and good upbringing seemed to have drained away with death. She had jettisoned the restrictive limitations like a too-tight corset or four-inch high heels and was now ready to run. This thought brought a smile to her face while her mother fretted and Mr. Fell scowled.

  “I will not have that kind of language in my house, young lady,” he said.

  “You called Uncle Bernie a fucking horse’s ass in this very room,” she replied. “It was Thanksgiving dinner, and Mom laughed.”

  “He’s not really your uncle,” Alora objected.

  Lorraine smiled and then grinned.

  “Lance Figueroa called to tell us that you’re living with that black thug,” her father said, “in the condo that I put the down payment on.”

  “You want me to move?”

  “I want him out of there. I want you to come to your senses.”

  “Ronnie saved my life,” she said. “He’s homeless and he’s trying to do what’s right. He sleeps on the couch and even if he were in my bed, you have no right to tell me what to do in my own home.”

  “I can stop paying the mortgage.”

  “That’s your choice,” Lorraine agreed. “Is that all you want from me?”

  “Lore,” her father pleaded. “I’m your father.”

  “You are,” she said, “but what you don’t understand is that I am no longer your little girl.” This was it. This was why she had come, why she ran for miles and then dominated bookish Alton Brown.

  “The child you knew is gone from this body,” she continued. “She’s dropping out of Columbia. She’s not sitting when you tell her to. If you stop paying the mortgage, she doesn’t care one whit. It would be best for you and Mom to think that I had died when I went missing and that the girl you knew is gone from the world.”

  “But, honey,” Alora said. “We love you.”

  The words sounded uncomfortable in the socialite’s mouth, but Lorraine believed them anyway.

  “I know, Mom,” she said. “I know, but the Lorraine you love is a memory now. She doesn’t fit into the world we lived in. You still have Papa and Damian. You still have all those times that we spent. If you want to get to know me and understand how much I’ve changed,
I’ll make sure that you always have my address and number.”

  Alora burst into loud crying, the tears literally jumping from her eyes.

  Lorraine had never seen her mother cry before; neither had her husband or Nova, who came running from some hidden nook to comfort her employer. Patrick Fell also hurried to his wife’s side.

  From what seemed like a great distance, Lorraine watched the family unit so torn by her death. Alora wailed while the black servant and the white aristocrat tried to restrain her flailing arms.

  The dead daughter quietly exited the room and the home she had known so well. Downstairs, in the concrete turnabout that looked over the East River, she found Alton Brown with One Hundred Years of Solitude unopened on his lap.

  “You waited,” she said.

  “I never met anybody like you before.”

  “I know. You want to go fuck now?”

  He stood up quickly and Lorraine grinned.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “YOU DON’T TALK very much, huh?” Alton Brown asked Lorraine Fell on the long walk from her parents’ Upper East Side condo down to her place on Fifth.

  “I used to,” she said, consciously slowing her pace. Lorraine’s legs wanted to run but she needed company after bringing so much pain into her parents’ lives. “Though I never said anything.”

  “You must have told people about how you felt and what you liked and didn’t,” Alton argued. “That’s something.”

  “You ever had some smart kid in one of your a graduate seminars who would go home and in one night read the entire Grundrisse or Moby-Dick? And then at the next class meeting they would be able to recall long quotes along with the page numbers for all the salient moments that had to do with that day’s lecture?”

  “What’s the Grundrisse?”

  “Capital was the first part of six separate sections Marx conceived on political economy,” Lorraine said, feeling like the smart-assed student she’d been before she died. “Though unfinished, the Grundrisse was all the other five.”

  “Yeah,” Alton said. “Ben Smithy.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The guy you’re talking about,” Alton said. “The guy who seemed to know everything about what you were studying in class. He would also know how all the ideas came together and proved, or didn’t, whatever anybody said about it. We all hated him because he acted like he was so far ahead of us.”