Inside a Silver Box (2 page)

Ronnie grasped after her because he was a predator and she was prey. It had nothing to do with color. It had nothing to do with race. Ronnie had already raped a dozen brown-skinned girls with fine butts and fat purses.

He yanked at her ankle and she yelped.

“Shut the fuck up, bitch!” Ronnie shouted.

He had already pulled down the gray silk shorts. He already had his erection out of his pants.

It was all too much for Lorraine. She slapped her attacker on the ear and he flew into a great rage, experiencing the ultimate hunger—the desire for blood.

Lorraine’s screaming didn’t help matters. She yelled and hollered.…

There was a pure white stone on the ground at Ronnie’s feet. It was the size of a softball and before he knew it the stone was in his hand.

“Help!” Lorraine was screaming, but this plea was cut short by the dull thud the stone made when caving in her right temple.

Later, when Ronnie was safely on the A train headed for Harlem, he chided himself for running before grabbing the girl’s waist wallet. “Why she have to scream like that?” he said softly to himself. “It’s not like I was gonna kill’er or nuthin’.”

Meanwhile Lorraine’s corpse was crushed down into the crevice under the boulder she had been philosophizing on. Next to her decimated skull lay the white stone, its color so pure that if one were to look closely, it seemed more like infinity than a small opaque surface.

*   *   *

F
IFTY-SEVEN YEARS EARLIER,
the Silver Box had re-formed a very small part of its inestimable nature upon the surface of the planet it now called home. This iota of its existence lay there passively, noting the radiation of the sun, the luminescence of moon and stars, the passage of insects, the sounds of mammals that shambled by. If some creature died within proximity of this sliver of virtual omnipotence, it absorbed that being’s essence in its eons-long attempt to understand the nature of Inglo and the Laz. Snails, insects, even a bird now and again merged with the luminescence of the Silver Box.

And so now the tenuous and wholly unique nature of the recently murdered Lorraine was sucked down into infinity.

*   *   *

W
HERE AM I?

In me.

Where am
I
?

Your body died but not before your being became part of me.

That man. He … he—

Forget that,
said the voice of the Silver Box.
That was another life. Now you are with me. Sleep.

No.

Forget.

No.

The Silver Box, in spite its infinite expanse, felt anchored to the violated woman. It could have forced her to sleep, to forget. It could have released her vital ether, what humans called the soul—but it was intrigued and held on to her being.

Are you there?
she called out, though voiceless and bodiless.

The Silver Box shuddered across the memory of the known and unknown universe. The plaintive plea of the disembodied soul calling out to it, causing bright sunsets and volcanic eruptions across a vastness that Lorraine Fell’s poor mind would not have been able to comprehend.

What do you want of me?
the Box said at last.

I want to understand. I want to see you and to understand what has happened.

In order to do that, you will have to return to your previous life,
the Box said.

Am I really dead?

There is no such thing as death the way you Earth-things understand it. There are beginnings and endings, remembrances and that which is forgotten. But these are perpetual events happening every moment in every so-called life. Has a child who has forgotten his grandmother died? No. Death and life are as inseparable as a man and his shadow as long as the sun shines.

But the sun sets every day,
Lorraine cried.
The sun sets.

Life is dependent upon gravity. As long as matter adheres, then life and its opposite remains.

I don’t care about any of that. I want my life back.

Then you must go to the one who took it. You must find the one named Ronnie Bottoms and ask him to return what he has taken.

Then let me go.

But, but I wanted to talk to you some more.

I’ll come back,
Lorraine Fell said or thought, or imagined she said or thought. Her mind was increasing its capacity after just a few moments in the enormity of the Silver Box’s being. She was beginning to become aware of herself apart from the corporeal reality that had completely defined her before death, only seconds ago.

You will?
the Silver Box asked.

I promise.

But you might get lost.

Remember me, and I will always be a part of you.

How do you know this?

I just do.

THREE

T
HEY ARRESTED RONNIE
Bottoms for a parole violation the day after he murdered Lorraine Fell. He had been scheduled to report for his second meet with his new PO, a woman named Steinmetz, but he had gotten high and decided to call in and say he had the flu. But he forgot to call in and a warrant was issued. He was taken to Rikers Island, where they put him in a cell designed for six men but which contained thirteen suspected felons. Four hours later he broke the jaw of a man named Aaron Ricks and was transferred to solitary confinement, where he languished for three and a half weeks.

Finally he was brought to trial in front of a judge named Parker, who released Ronnie with a warning not to miss his weekly meetings with his parole officer. Ronnie was used to being arrested, imprisoned, and then released again. He hit the streets hungry, looking for money. He needed money for food and friendship, wine and maybe some weed.

Whenever Ronnie thought about money, his first impulse was to go home to his mother in East New York. This reflex disturbed the young street thug. He hadn’t seen his mother in seven years; she’d been dead for four of those years.

“Stupid,” he’d say to himself whenever going home came into his mind. There was no more home to go to. His mother, born Elsinore and called Elsie, was dead in a grave somewhere he didn’t even know; buried by his half brother and stepsister while he was in jail awaiting trial for assault and attempted robbery.

When Ronnie got hungry for money then thought about his mother, he’d get angry and turn that anger on somebody he could rob and take his ire out on.

*   *   *

J
EREMY VALENTINE DIDN’T
know anything about silver boxes, street thugs, or murdered philosophers-in-training. He was once a top earner at AIB, Alamaigne International Bank. That was before the economic downturn forced him out. Jeremy now worked for Marsh and Marsh Personal Investors down in TriBeCa. There he gave advice to small investors about how to keep their money from slipping through their fingers into the coffers of the Chinese and the banks, taxes and inflation. Jeremy didn’t like his job; didn’t like Bob Marsh or Fielding Marsh or the cramped offices among the warehouses, coffee shops, and hippie hangouts of the no-man’s-land between Greenwich Village and Wall Street.

Jeremy was walking toward the West Side Highway, smoking a cigarette and trying to figure out how he could get back into the mainstream of corporate America. He tried to call his ex-girlfriend Mia. She’d stopped seeing him two weeks after he lost his position at AIB. There was interference on his cell phone and the call wouldn’t go through.

Ronnie Bottoms was three paces behind Jeremy. As a rule, the mugger didn’t jump people in broad daylight but he was hungry and broke and mad about his mother. The street was empty at that moment and Ronnie made his move.

Jeremy felt that there was someone behind him. He considered running.
Why not run?
he thought.
People run all the time. They call it exercise. I could have just all of a sudden decided to exercise or maybe I remembered an appointment that I had to get to. I wouldn’t necessarily look like a fool if I just took off running.

“No,” a voice in Jeremy’s head said.

“No?” Jeremy thought this question, and then his consciousness was pushed aside. That’s how it felt to him. He was still
there,
still hearing and seeing the street, but he was no longer connected to his physical body. He couldn’t move or speak. His mind was somehow disconnected from his body, but his body still moved, seemingly of its own accord. It turned quickly and faced a brutish-looking black man who was half a step away with a hand raised in a very threatening manner.

“Ronnie Bottoms,” Jeremy heard his voice say—no … command.

“How you know my name?” the 280-some pounds of rage and hunger demanded.

“You murdered a girl and pushed her under a stone,” Jeremy said with an unfamiliar personal confidence that was undergirded by a very familiar fear.

“Fuck you, dude,” Ronnie said. His raised hand shook but the blow did not fall.

“You must go back to her.”

“Who the fuck are you, man?”

“You must return,” Lorraine Fell said with Jeremy’s vocal cords.

“You crazy.”

Lorraine made Jeremy’s hands grab Ronnie by both wrists but was pushed down and kicked. She didn’t feel the pain but cried out in impotence when Ronnie ran from Jeremy’s trembling, defeated form. The onetime stockbroker regained some of the control of his body when he fell.

Lorraine allowed her ethereal self to disengage and rise above the distasteful male vessel. Her wraith-self had no physical senses; in this form, she could not see or hear, taste or touch. But she could sense the sin-heavy bulk of hunger, Ronnie Bottoms, fleeing. She knew that the spiteful, self-centered lattice on the ground below her had already rejected the feeling that his mind and body had been possessed.

Lorraine turned off her sense of frustration and presence, fading from the transitory moment and reappearing many hours later at what felt like a preordained rendezvous with her murderer.

FOUR

R
ONNIE BOTTOMS DIDN’T
question his senses. But he wasn’t worried much about his perceptions. The stranger’s knowledge was crazy but that wouldn’t put food in his mouth.

“It was just some kinda trick,” he said.

“What?” an older Asian man asked.

“Who the fuck’s talkin’ to you, Chink?” Ronnie said, not any angrier or hungrier than usual. He considered charging the old man a fine for bothering him. He’d just say,
You owe me fi’e dollars for that,
and if the man paid of his own accord, then it wouldn’t even be robbery, not really.

The old man was from Vietnam. He had fought on the side of the French and then with the Americans against the Vietcong and Ho Chi Min. At that time, he believed in the war, but later he realized that every man, woman, and child in his country had been fighting different wars while thinking they moved as One against the Other.

Lorraine was distracted by this chain of thoughts. She wondered for the first time if all people were not innocent on their own.

Evil,
she thought,
can exist only if more than one person participates in it. Every torturer needs his victim. Every human deed needs a human object in order to be judged.

But Lorraine turned away from these notions and took control of Ma Lin’s mind.

“You must go back to her, Ronnie Bottoms,” she said with the aged warrior’s lips and tongue.

“Who the fuck are you now, man?” Ronnie said loudly.

People all around turned to see the origin of the vocalized rage and fear.

“You must go back to her,” Ma Lin said. “I will come to you in a hundred bodies until you agree.”

“Who are you?”

“Come back with me to the place where you buried her and you will see.”

“Why don’t you just get inside my head and make me?” Ronnie asked. He wasn’t a stupid man. He’d seen movies where people were taken over by aliens, devils, and mad scientists.

“I don’t know why,” Lorraine admitted. “All I know is that you have to agree or I will tell the police that you murdered a young woman and left the body under that big rock.”

“You don’t know that!” Ronnie exclaimed as three subway passengers made their way to another car.

“I don’t need to know it,” Lorraine reasoned. “I just have to tell a policeman that I saw you do it, that and your name, Ronnie Bottoms.”

Fear crawled between Ronnie’s scalp and skull. It felt like roaches racing around in the darkness of his mind.

“Excuse me, sir,” a man said.

Ronnie looked up and saw that it was a policeman. He was a big man with his hand on his pistol.

“Yeah?” Ronnie asked.

“Not you,” the policeman said.

“Yes, Officer,” Ma Lin/Lorraine replied evenly, with raised eyebrows added for innocence.

“Is this guy bothering you?” the white-skinned, blue-eyed policeman asked the old man while gazing at Ronnie.

“No, sir, he is not. We were talking about a place in the park we used to go. He’s loud, my friend. Somebody might have thought that he was angry.”

There was something wrong there; that’s what the policeman, Officer Stillman Tressman, thought.

“You got any weapons on you?” Tressman asked Ronnie.

“No, sir,” the prison-trained young man replied.

Looking at Bottoms’s hands, the officer got another idea. “Would you like me to walk you somewhere, sir?” he asked Ma Lin. “Maybe to a different car.”

“No, Officer. I’m perfectly happy sitting on this bench, talking to my friend Ronnie Bottoms.”

Now the elderly Vietnamese became suspect in the eyes of the police officer. Young black thugs and old Asian men in baggy clothes did not sit together except by chance—or for trouble. Stillman Tressman looked from one to the other, trying to find a foothold, a toehold from which he could project his authority and therefore keep the peace.