“She made me.”
“I know,” he said. “I was trying to hold on to you with my words, but her sex was too strong.”
“I knew it,” I said. It felt like an unfaithful lover’s confession.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I could fly but don’t remember how.”
“And what do you want now?”
I looked him in the eye. We were the same height. Where he was thin and golden, I was strong and the color of milk chocolate. There wasn’t much of my white mother in me.
I shrugged and held back a sob. Ever since I’d left Claudia’s van I wanted back in. Back into her presence. She was the only thought my mind could hold on to. Everything else was dissolving. All my memories and desires were fading like temporary images glimpsed in the contours of a cloud.
“Would you like to hear the rest of my sermon?” Ordé asked.
I still knew how to nod on my own.
He went right into his talk just as if it were still noon.
“You are neither worm nor butterfly,” Ordé said, “but only the dry husk left after the metamorphosis. If you die, it is of no consequence. Your life is only the blind bumbling of an abandoned newborn. Your pleasure is salt and sand. Your heat is tepid tea. Your life a short gust across stagnant water —”
The words came over me like a cool balm, a restorative love. The condemnation didn’t bother me. He was my teacher standing on a philosopher’s stone. His brutal words were only truth.
“— water that cannot flow. True life is in my veins. It is in my eyes and words. There are only two ways to become of the light. Either you see the true words or you are born of the blood of truth. You can never ascend. You have only the slight possibility of half knowledge. You may perceive that there is a truth beyond you, but you will never know it, you will never glide between the stars on webs of unity.”
Not only was there truth in his words, but somehow his words themselves were true. Like Claudia’s kiss, Ordé’s words brought me visions of a place between things. A space that is smaller than an atom but that still encompasses everything in existence. A place that is not yet here but that is coming.
“Do you want to see it, Chance?”
“Huh?”
“Will you risk your worthless life for an inkling of the truth?” His voice was kind and concerned.
There was no choice. He was a god and I, a blind mole.
We went down toward his small house. He wore a brightly colored tie-dyed monk’s cloak and habit, but nobody looked twice. This was the Bay Area in 1969 and a black man, a brother, walking with a white man who wore his hair like a woman didn’t turn heads.
In the light you could see that his home was made up of four small rooms with bare floors that were scarcely furnished. We went into the kitchen. I sat down at the table, remembering Mary sitting there dead. I wondered if my other friends had died at that table. While I wondered, he switched on a glaring electric light and put a white ceramic bowl in front of me. I noticed dark remnants splattered on the floor and walls. When I looked up, Ordé was approaching me with a sharp cork-hafted knife.
“If I speak to a crowd, they listen because they suspect the truth in my words,” he was saying. “One day I’ll run for office.”
I stared at the knife as he stood over me.
“But if I connect with the truth in words while talking to a small group, or just one person, the truth is known. I am the doorway to truth, Chance.”
“Are you going to kill me?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The others died, but you’re different. You’re … you’re weaker than they were. You’re one of the susceptible ones. More than anyone, you hear us. You hear the music.”
He handed the knife to me. “Cut a vein and cover the bottom of the bowl to about an inch or so.”
I didn’t want to die and I was sure that what he was going to do would kill me. But I couldn’t refuse him. Death was better by far than his disappointment. I cut my wrist and the blood flowed freely. The feeling of the blood trickling down between my fingers was familiar, almost comforting. It was a sensation I associated with power — my power.
The warm dollops plopped quickly into the white bowl. I tried to stop the bleeding with my thumb, but the blood kept coming. I tried three fingers, but still it came between and around. I was beginning to panic when Ordé took my wrist and placed a large gauze pad over the cut. He pressed hard for about a minute and then produced bandage tape and wound it tightly about the gauze. A large circle of blood grew on the bandage but stopped before reaching the edges.
Then Ordé took the knife. He raised his sleeve, showing his wrist. There were many scars there along the vein. I wondered if each incision meant a death.
Ordé chose a spot between scars. He dug in the point and made a quick twist with his wrist. The blood came out in quick droplets, mixing with mine. Ordé’s blood was darker, but mine was heavier. At first the droplets formed little pools across the top like dark islets in a crimson sea. But as he bled more, the islets came together to form continents.
When he was finished Ordé simply pressed his thumb against the small incision for ten seconds or so. The bleeding stopped completely, and I wondered if that had to do with his truth also.
“We have to wait for the mixture to prepare itself,” Ordé said.
He sat across from me and smiled.
I remembered the first time I sat in his presence on the afternoon I’d decided to die the second time.
“How’s it goin’, brother?” he asked me.
“Fine.”
“You at the school?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What you do there?”
“I study Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War and its impact on the idea of history. That’s the general idea anyway. …” I stopped myself from going on to explain that the general and medical observer and historian not only told history but was himself a part of that history; he was history. That was my thesis, simple and elegant, I believed. But no one in Ancient Studies had thought my idea was scholarly enough, and they were happy to see me gone.
“You like that?”
“It doesn’t seem to matter. Maybe it did a long time ago, but not now.”
“All you learn around here is how to mix up the slop,” Ordé said.
“You got that right.” That was the first time I felt Ordé’s truth telling, but I didn’t know it then.
“You know the water tower above the statue back up in Garber Park?”
“Yeah?”
“I get together with some people there at noon on Wednesdays. You’d learn a lot more up there than you ever will in a classroom.”
“About what?” I asked.
Ordé turned to me then and looked in my eyes. “About everything you miss every day. About a whole world that these fools down here don’t even know exists.”
Back then I thought it was his eyes that convinced me to live at least until the following Wednesday.
Sitting there in his kitchen, as we stared at each other over a bowl of our blood, I wondered at how far I had drifted from my pristine studies.
“See,” Ordé said. “The blood mixes itself.”
He was right. The darker blood and the lighter had formed into longish clumps like fat worms. They twisted and turned against each other, sometimes slowly, sometimes fast. Every now and then two worms would collapse and fall together and then fall apart — another color completely now, almost white.
“When they’re all the same color it will be ready,” Ordé said.
I watched the spinning worms, thinking that this was the first time I could see Ordé’s truth outside of my mind. It wasn’t just Ordé’s words or Claudia’s lovemaking that dazzled me. This was proof.
My stomach began to tighten. The back of my neck trembled, and I wanted to jump up from that table. I wanted to run.
“You see,” Ordé said. “They’re all that milky pink color.”
“Yeah
,” I barked.
Ordé went to a drawer in the built-in cabinets around the sink. He pulled out a small whisk and came back. The pink worms were writhing violently by then.
Ordé plunged the whisk in and mixed briskly. The worms turned back to liquid. It was as if the writhing were an illusion, a vision brought on by Ordé’s suggestion.
“This is the lightest color I’ve ever seen,” Ordé said.
“You mean like with Mary?” I asked.
“She was the first,” he said. “That’s what killed her and Janet Wong and Bruce too. They drank a darker fluid and died.”
Ordé looked me in the eye.
I raised the bowl to my lips. The thick fluid was warm on my tongue. In my throat it seemed to change back into worms. Sinuous and twisting they went down. I tried to take the blood from my lips, but Ordé put out his hand to increase the tilt of the bowl. I drank it all down. And then threw the bowl to the floor.
Inside me the worms were on the march. Through my stomach to my intestines. Under my skin and into my heart. I screamed louder than I had for Claudia. When I jumped up Ordé tried to grab me, but I hit him and he went down. I ran to the front door and out into the street; then I took off. Every now and then the parasites in my body brought on a spasm, and I’d fall tumbling across lawns and from sidewalks into the street. A car bumped into me on Telegraph, but I kept on running.
The visions started a few blocks after the accident. Wide bands of light in which images and histories unfolded. Molecules the size of galaxies, strange-looking creatures moving in and out of multicolored lights. A flat plain appeared on one curving screen of blue. The plain, as my mind entered it, spread out in all directions. No path to follow or mountain to set my sights on …
“What’s wrong with him, Martinez?”
“He’s trippin’, Sarge. Trippin’ hard.”
They must have been policemen. They must have arrested me. I know they did because I woke up in the drunk tank of the Berkeley jailhouse. But I was distracted by the visions and the sounds too. I imagined stars singing in a chorus; it was no mistake, no happenstance. There was meaning and the deft motions of a dance among the suns. It was then I realized that the worms had bored their way into my brain.
A pane of light opened before me. It shone like a parchment burning with alien inscriptions, equations, and hieroglyphs. I stared at the burning pages as they moved past. I took in each character but understood very little. Toward the end was the full biography of Ordé. His childhood as a liar and his adult life as a saint. I saw and felt everything he had known and done up until the moment of blue light.
There was a flash and then I was, myself, a page.
A blank sheet.
An unwritten footnote.
Four
“LESTER?”
I opened my eyes to see a tall white man dressed in a white smock that hung open to reveal a red-and-yellow-plaid shirt and blue jeans.
“Yeah.”
“I’m Dr. Colby. How do you feel?”
“Where am I?”
“At Santa Teresa rest home.”
“I’m tired,” I said.
At some other time (it could have been later that day or another week) I awoke to find Colby standing over my bed again. He was thin. The whites of his eyes were laced with red veins, veins that seemed to be writhing.
“How do you feel?” he asked again.
“I don’t know. Everything looks funny.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Like your skin. If I look at it hard, I can see all kinds of blues and yellows that are like the negative of a photograph.”
“Do you feel nausea? Headache?”
“Why?”
“Do you have any history of blood disease?”
“No.”
“Any problems?” He was trying to sound nonchalant.
“Am I sick?”
“There seems to be something wrong with your blood. Not wrong really, but odd. It’s not acting like we expect it to.”
“So what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.” The doctor ran his hand over his short salt-and-pepper hair. “We’ve sent it out for tests.”
He took my blood pressure and peered into my eyes, throat, and ears. While he examined me, I learned that I had been in the sanitarium for three and a half months.
“A fellow named Portman had you brought here,” the doctor told me. “He calls every week to see how you’re doing.”
“I’d like to talk to him the next time he calls,” I said.
“When you’re strong enough to walk.” Colby gave me a friendly smile. “We don’t have phones in the rooms.”
He gave me a dark green pill and left the room after he’d made sure that I swallowed it. I fell near to sleep, into a kind of half-dreaming, pensive state.
I was aware of new possibilities in life. Like an amoebic cell drifting in the ocean, dreaming of becoming a whale. Like a bag of cement waiting to become a part of a highway or bridge. There was anticipation in every sound and sensation.
Light flittered across my eyelids. A wooden flute played softly.
Ordé was sitting next to my bed, wearing that secondhand brown suit. He’d added an almost shapeless gray fedora to the ensemble — long blond hair flowed out from under the back brim. He smiled. It was a pleasant smile, a smile that a parent has for another man’s child. But I could no longer have the innocent love I once felt for the prophet. I was a worker now. An adult meant for lifting and toting, building and protecting.
“I’m sorry I have to wake you up, Chance. It’s almost Christmas and we have to get on with our work.” Ordé smiled again and I sat up.
I was still weak, though, and fell back into the pillows of my sanitarium bed.
“You have to get back your strength, cousin. You’ll need a few weeks to eat and exercise. Then you’ll be ready to come back and teach us how to do the blood ritual right.”
I wanted to speak but passed out instead.
When I woke up again it was night and I was alone.
The room I was in was large with a high domed ceiling. There was a big white door that must’ve led to some hallway, and then there were double glass doors, covered in white lace, that went outside.
The moon was shining through the curtains. I forced myself to stand up and walk to the glass doors. I didn’t feel strong enough to pull them open, but I moved the curtains to the side and gazed up at the moon. I can’t express the joy that I felt looking up, being filled with light. Even the comparatively sterile light of the moon is filled with wonderful truths. With my heightened senses, I could actually feel the light against my skin. The tactile sensation caused slight frictions along my nerves. It was like the diminishing strain of a classical composition that had gotten so soft a breeze could have erased it.
The music spoke of that spinning celestial body and of the sun’s heat. There was a long-ago cry of free-forming gases and a yearning for silence. The universe, I knew then, was alive. Alive but still awakening. And that awakening was occurring inside my mind. I was a conduit. We were all conduits. With my mind I could reach out to the radiance that embraced me.
But I didn’t understand. I wasn’t blessed by light. The potion Ordé gave me opened my senses but gave me precious little knowledge. I was like the tinfoil put on a jury-rigged coat-hanger antenna — merely a convenience, an afterthought with few ideas of my own.
The universe spoke to me in a language that was beyond my comprehension. But even to hear the words, just to feel them, filled me with a sense of being so large that I couldn’t imagine containing any more.
Then there came a yipping like pinching at the back of my neck. I put my hand back there but found nothing. I saw a dark blur outside the window. Two night eyes, four, six, eight.
The coyotes came slowly toward the window. I wasn’t afraid. They exuded a music like the moon did, but theirs was a quartet of fast drums and a thrumming of blood.
From behind
them came a larger coyote. This one, when she came into the light that carpeted the lawn, showed herself to be one-eyed. The young canines moved to their mother as she stared up at me.
I opened the doors and they all rushed in, jumping around me. In my weakened state I fell to the floor. The young coyotes pushed their forepaws against me and yipped. They nuzzled their wet snouts against my face and rubbed their bony ribs against me. They smelled of things wild and feral, but I wasn’t afraid. I felt them the same way I could feel the moon. It was as if I had been a fifth cub with them in the den where they were born, as if I had run with them and suckled on my own special teat. I felt the yip in my throat and a growl too.
That’s when Coyote stood before me. The cubs moved away and I looked at their mother. She whined, wanting to tell me something, I was sure. But I didn’t understand. She pawed the pine floor and licked my bare feet to no avail.
At that moment the door to the hallway opened. All six faces in the room turned toward the light. A small Asian woman stood there. She threw her hands up above her head and tried to turn and run at the same time; instead, she fell to the floor, screaming.
I felt a searing pain between my left shoulder and my neck. I turned to see five coyote tails moving fast across the moonlit lawn. The nurse was hollering for all she was worth. A deep dread settled in on me and I lost consciousness again.
I was unconscious for five days. The rabies shots they administered weakened me so much that the doctors thought I might die. But Ordé said that he was never worried about that.
“You’re a blue blood now,” he told me. “Pale but still blue enough.”
In two more weeks I was strong enough to leave Santa Teresa’s. My body was strong, but my mind was full of dread.
“They were like Claudia’s friend, the dog? You’re sure?” Ordé asked on the bus back to Berkeley.
“I could … could, like, hear them, you know?”
“You mean, you felt it like that?” Ordé said rubbing the thumb and forefinger of both hands lightly together.
Somehow the gesture made sense, and I nodded.
“And so when she bit you, she was trying to communicate,” Ordé said. “She was telling you something.”
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