Inside a Silver Box (12 page)

“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

S
TANDING 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.

*   *   *

F
OR 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.

Lorraine laughed and pushed playfully against his chest.

“Come sit with me, girl.”

She acquiesced, wondering as she did so, was this an act of compliance or resonance?

“I can see what’s missin’ and you can see what’s there. That’s what Ma Lin said, right?” the young man asked.

“Yes,” Lorraine replied. “And I think it’s true. It’s like I can see myself better. But I can especially understand things when I’m running, moving fast. It’s kinda like speed and accuracy of ideas are somehow connected.”

“And here I like bein’ still and quiet.”

“It’s almost like we changed places partly,” Lorraine opined.

“Maybe that’s why you don’t hate me all the time,” Ronnie added. “Maybe sometimes you feel what I felt.”

“I don’t know about that,” Lorraine said, trying the stifle the anger his words brought out in her. “But I do understand what the Silver Box meant when he said that we were all guilty of something. I took over that guy’s mind that you were walking behind downtown. You could have killed him but I didn’t care. And with Ma Lin, I messed up his soul and then I killed him.”

“Why didn’t you take me over?” Ronnie asked.

“Because something told me that I couldn’t make you give your life for mine.”

“My life?”

“I thought that bringing me back would kill you. That was why I went after you, not only to bring me back but to get vengeance.”

“Damn.”

“Like you said,” Lorraine admitted. “Part of me still hates you.”

“Don’t I know it too.”

“I killed Ma Lin and now he’s a ghost thinking that machines are better than people,” Lorraine continued as if Ronnie hadn’t spoken. “I hate you and other men too. I was letting this big strong black kid chase me and all the while I was hoping, just a little, that he’d have a heart attack and die. And somewhere in my heart I know that I’ve always felt like this.”

“So do you want me to leave you alone?” Ronnie asked, wondering where he would go.

“How can you?” she replied. “You and I are connected, and anyway, we have to save the world.”

TWENTY-ONE

“H
OLD IT RIGHT
there!” a man’s voice commanded.

Lorraine and Ronnie had just climbed down from the deceptively close cluster of boulders that surrounded an unsuspected, ever-widening nexus of the Earth and the rest of the universe. There were five policemen flanking the two from all sides.

“Five,” Ronnie stated clearly, hoping Lorraine understood how serious that was.

“We’ve been looking for you two,” a policeman with three angular stripes on each of his shoulders said. He approached Ronnie, pushing him in a way familiar to the former street thug.

The young man turned without being told to and put his hands against stone.

“What did we do?” Lorraine asked while the senior officer frisked her loved and hated friend.

“What were you doing behind these rocks?” the officer replied.

Two of the uniforms climbed up into the nest of stones.

Ronnie wondered what they would see.

“Talking,” Lorraine answered.

“Are you selling it or giving it?” the officer said.

“What?”

“It’s not like that,” Ronnie said. “It just ain’t, man.”

“Somebody saw you carrying a dead man up in there,” the policeman challenged.

“Man, if you saw me kill and carry some dude, I know you already been up in there. And if you have been, then you know ain’t nobody dead to see.”

When the cop finished his body search, Ronnie turned around.

“You have ID?” a policeman asked Lorraine.

Lorraine produced her identification from the wallet Ronnie forgot to run with after taking her life.

The sergeant looked at her picture on the driver’s license. “Could be you,” he said. “Could be your sister.”

The two rock-climber policemen came back, shaking their heads.

“You’re not supposed to be climbing up behind the rocks like that in this area,” the senior official said. “This is a family park.”

“Then why don’t you put up a sign?” Lorraine said with scorn.

“Don’t get smart with me, young lady.”

“It’s not very hard to do. You should try it sometime.”

“It’s okay, Officer,” Ronnie said before the head cop could speak again. “Lore just ain’t nevah been stopped by the police before. She don’t know how to ack.”

“Let’s see your ID,” he said in answer.

“Left it at home in my other pants.”

“What’s your name?” the lead law enforcement officer asked.

“Ronnie Bottoms.”

“Where do you live?”

“I’m stayin’ at Lore’s right now, brother. We ain’t done nuthin’, man. Really.”

There were police all around them. Ronnie could feel the anger pouring off Lorraine. He could sense the heat of her outrage and the pulse of her indignant heart. For him, the police with their truncheons and guns were like a sudden rain shower or birds on a wire. This was his atmosphere before Lorraine had sucked out his being in a vain attempt at revenge.

“We was just kissin’, man,” Ronnie said. “That’s all.”

“I could arrest you,” the policeman speculated.

“For what?”

“You might be an illegal alien.”

Lorraine giggled.

“Alien?” Ronnie countered. “You mean you think I’m from China or Mexico? Shit, man, all you got to do is hear me talk and you know that ain’t true.”

“Have you seen anybody fighting around here?” the sergeant asked, changing tactics with ease.

“No, brother, no. Lore an’ me just stopped for a kiss and we about to go on.”