Inside a Silver Box (20 page)

Now and then Lorraine would stop, not because she was tired but to see the connection between her motion and her sight. When she was still, her knowledge became like memory, almost static. The waters receded into simple flowing. The sun shone but did not holler and brag. Children’s eyes were inquisitive but no longer revealed bits and pieces of the long thread of material evolution that most scientists had mistaken for the only form of life.

When she started running again, a more complex comprehension dawned once more within her. It was as if this knowledge were separate from her or, more correctly, she was merely a small part of a greater awareness that could only be obtained by motion.

She made the circuit of Manhattan six times before the jitters in her bones were sated. Her body thrummed and her mind contained thoughts that were as vast as the terrain she traveled. By the time she got back to her condo, she was grinning like child at play.

When she came into the apartment, she heard sounds from the kitchen.

“Ronnie?”

“No, baby, it’s me,” Nova Triphammer-Louise said.

The mid-height, bottom-heavy, dark-skinned woman came from the kitchen, smiling with her perfect, slightly dulled teeth. Nova’s face was round and handsome, her age somewhere past retirement.

Seeing the family servant, Lorraine felt a little like her old self again. She remembered the nights she would lie in bed, worrying about infinity, and Nova Louise would come sit beside her on the bed and they would sing hymns the old black woman knew by heart.

Nova wore black stretch pants and a peacock blue T-shirt. Her shoes were black fabric with white rubber soles.

“What are you doing here, Nova?”

“Cleanin’ like I do every week. You et up all your cereal and milk. They’re bein’ delivered.”

“How’s Mom?”

“When she wouldn’t stop cryin’ after two days, your father called a woman doctor and she put her in a sanatorium up in Riverdale.”

“Oh.” In her mind, Lorraine realized she had turned away so completely from her family that they could have died and she might not have ever known. She, who was once a member of something, was now a lone soldier on foreign turf. She had, she felt, lost the world she’d belonged to and could not call up the desire in her heart to get it back.

She had few real feelings left for her past life, but the emptiness of this loss caused a kind of bereavement in her breast. She brought up a hand to place over the metaphorical wound.

Nova threw tan shammy cloth down on a blue sofa and went to take Lorraine in her arms. The young woman resisted at first but then surrendered to the embrace.

“What’s wrong, baby?” Nova asked, her face in the profusion of damp blond hair.

“You remember when we used to sing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’?”

“Of course I do,” Nova whispered. “You used to always say ‘leading off for more’ instead of ‘war.’”

They giggled together.

“That’s kind of where I’m at.”

“God will see you through.”

“But he’s too big, Novie, and I’m too small.”

*   *   *

R
ONNIE RETURNED FROM
his parolee job a few hours later, after Nova had gone. He found Lorraine sitting in the deep ledge at the window, looking out on Fifth Avenue.

“You smell like smoke,” she said when he climbed in next to her.

“It’s like bein’ in a furnace all day long. But you know, I kinda like it. My boss keep a six-hundred-pound can’a water back there, and every now and then he bring some random dude back to see how I could lift it up.”

Lorraine took Ronnie’s hand and held it tight. “I’ve seen things that I can’t understand, but I know them,” she said.

“It’s like you’re a little kid on a merry-go-round,” he intuited from that touch. “You’re goin’ and faster and faster and might fall off any minute, but you don’t even care.”

“You know that?”

“What can you tell about me?”

“That we need to find your family,” she whispered, “and we have to trap Inglo so the Silver Box doesn’t destroy the world.”

“What else?”

“That we kind of like traded places,” Lorraine said. “That my prison is your treasure and your anger was somehow hidden in my heart.”

“Let’s get dressed and go down to the park before we meet our dates,” Ronnie told Lorraine, and she kissed his knuckle before traipsing off to her bedroom.

*   *   *

U
SED-TO-BE-CLAUDE
AND
MA
LIN
were waiting for them that early evening. The space inside the crevice of tall boulders was now as wide as six football fields. The stone table was a little larger and the living waterfall cascaded in the distance.

Ma Lin was standing with his hands behind his back in military fashion while UTB-Claude sat at the edge of the table in his black suit, now wearing a red shirt but still with no shoes or socks.

“Why don’t you wear shoes, Claude?” Ronnie asked, feeling closer to the wino than to the ex-military cop.

“Because I don’t need them.”

“You don’t need pants neither, but you wearin’ ’em.”

“Covering the loins is an older practice than sheathing the foot.”

“We must hurry,” Ma Lin said.

“Why?” Lorraine asked.

“Because we must.”

“Are you the Silver Box?” she replied.

“I speak for it.”

“But are you it?”

“No.”

“Then don’t order us around.”

Ma Lin’s eyes tightened, and his removed demeanor took on an intense focus. Ronnie wondered if his hands would once again become a bludgeon and a bayonet. But the ex-MP, ex–Inglo slave, the ex–human being turned abruptly and stalked off toward the distant waterfall that Ronnie knew was laughing at them.

“Lin’s an experiment,” UTB-Claude said. “Silver Box is everything, but that doesn’t mean that it is just one being. It allows its separate units to have some autonomy. Even I’m a little different. I mean the man I’m based on is dead and gone. His soul rose up over the rainbow and is headed for an existence way beyond what we are. But I still contain the memories of what it was to be the man named Claude Festerling. He was more or less a good fellow who didn’t make many demands. Lin wasn’t like that. He killed people when they crossed a line, sometimes even when they might have crossed a line. Silver Box is experimenting with that attitude, if not the actions it calls for.”

“What do you want from us, Claude?” Ronnie asked, realizing that the resurrected wino would talk all day if he wasn’t directed.

“Take off your clothes,” UTB-Claude said, “both of you.”

Ronnie and Lorraine felt no shame disrobing before either each other or UTB-Claude. In less than a minute, they had removed their clothes and placed them on the stone bench next to the stone table.

“Sit,” Claude said to Ronnie.

After this, he turned to Lorraine and said, “Kiss your friend with your tongue. Put your hand on his member.”

Lorraine smiled and did this. She leaned back after a long caress and said, “Why, Ronnie, you got a big hard dick.”

“Get on it,” Claude said, sounding a bit more on the human side.

“Hold up, brother,” Ronnie complained. “It’s not like that with us.”

“Nevertheless,” the dead wino replied.

Lorraine mounted Ronnie’s erection and suddenly they were together but no longer sitting on the stone table under the supervision of UTB-Claude. They were facing each other but no longer having sex.

“Where are we?” Lorraine asked.

“And what happened to us?” her friend and killer added.

THIRTY-THREE

T
HEY WERE STANDING
on a fragrant pile of garbage in a junkyard outside some city, somewhere in the world. Standing side by side, they were once again dressed in the clothes they’d worn to what would become known to them as the Sacred Crevice.

Lorraine looked at Ronnie. “You still got your dick up in me, son,” she said with an accent common to his part of town.

“You think Claude is fuckin’ wit’ us?”

“Is that supposed to be a joke, Ronnie Bottoms?”

In the distance, beyond a high chain-metal fence, there were dirt roads and hovels, people moving around by foot, bicycle, and now and then by car.

“Smells like a dead man,” Ronnie said.

“And his sister,” Lorraine agreed.

“You know, Lore, it’s like since you came back to life, you aren’t exactly the same.”

“It’s me, Ronnie,” she said, “only now I almost understand what before I just wondered about.”

Ronnie was about to ask what it was that she nearly understood when a slight, bronze-skinned man and a feral-looking brown and yellow dog approached the mound of garbage upon which the star-crossed friends stood.

The man looked to have a fever. His yellowy eyes glistened with an oily light, and there was a machete gripped in his left hand. His skin shone in the morning sun, and his inch-long straight black hair stood out as if charged by atmospheric electricity. He only wore shapeless tan pants cinched by a hemp rope in lieu of a belt.

The mongrel at the man’s side was long-limbed with a distended belly. It had been an old dog, maybe even a dying dog, but now its hot eyes and greasy pelt were vibrating with vitality.

Both man and cur were grinning madly. Ronnie could see that they were about to attack.

“Who are you?” the street thug from New York asked the rabid pair.

The snarling dog cocked its head to the right as if to better hear the question already asked. The man’s grinning maw closed but was still filled with mirth.

“Nontee,” the man said, and then his companion yipped and howled. “Nontee of the eighty-sixth house of the last tribe of Ga. We are the second limb of a first orchard and I am the fruit of Lambor and Ty.”

“You a cousin to Inglo?”

The smiles vanished. Both man and dog—whom Ronnie thought were the same person in much the same way that Ma Lin and UTB-Claude were one with the Silver Box—found their master’s name distasteful coming from Ronnie’s lips. But still they held back.

“You cannot mention the name of God,” the man-half of Nontee said. “Just its utterance is greater than the worth of your life, your race, your species, your world.”

“We’re communists, Nontee,” Lorraine said with a smile. “We don’t believe in worth in any kind of hierarchical sense.”

Lorraine’s tone was arrogant and effectively cut off any attempt Ronnie was making at détente.

“Get ready to fight,” Ronnie whispered.

The dog leaped with extraordinary speed but Ronnie caught its back left paw before it could clench its slobbering jaws on Lorraine’s throat. Ronnie threw the mutt across a vast expanse of junk and litter, then ran after it, intent on the kill.

Meanwhile the bronze-skinned manifestation of Nontee ran forward, brandishing his knife at Lorraine. He swiped and swung, jabbed and made complex forms with the flashing blade, but Lorraine simply moved like the water she ran past that morning. Nontee’s gestures were slow compared to her speed. His rage was a balm to her sense of being.

“I will kill you!” the onetime garbage dweller cried.

“You will die,” Lorraine averred, and then she ducked under a swipe that would have severed anyone else. “… and I will also one day die. But you won’t kill me.”

Nontee screamed and Lorraine laughed as she darted about, avoiding the man-thing’s attempts to impale her.

In the meanwhile, Ronnie clenched one hand on the junkyard dog’s throat while the mongrel had its jaws clamped on his left forearm. There were pain and rage in Ronnie’s heart. He could feel the throat of the beast with its steel-band-like muscles and tendons trying to sever his bone. He could feel the poison of the saliva moving through his blood. Through all of this Ronnie felt sad for the mad creature that could imagine only devastation. He wondered if the atom of Inglo, Nontee, was drawn to this scrapyard because it so clearly reflected the state of his soul.

*   *   *

L
ORRAINE STEPPED ON
a hidden cardboard box, lost her footing, and fell. Nontee, as the bronze junkman, cried out in victory, raised his pitted dark blade, and made ready to sever the limbs of his enemy. Once he’d succeeded, she’d be his pet worm that would mewl and crawl back to her mechanical master.

Lorraine could see this future in her enemy’s eyes; she was not afraid, however. Even if Ronnie died or was defeated; even if she was made into a human grub, she would never again be slave to fear. She was now a warrior, and no man was or would be her master.

Lorraine smiled then. She looked the zombie man in the eye and laughed. For a moment, the human manifestation of Nontee hesitated, wondering what trick his enemy hid from him. In that moment, Lorraine saw flying through the air the dog corpse of Nontee thrown with remarkable accuracy at his human half. Nontee the man turned to see the dead dog smash into his chest. Before he could right himself, Lorraine was up with his big knife in her hand. The bronze man’s head flew from his body as hot blood spouted over the laughing woman.

When Ronnie reached them, she had fallen to her knees. Nontee the headless man was also kneeling, leaning up against an old trunk that had been discarded and forgotten.

“You’re bleeding,” Lorraine said to Ronnie.

“A lot,” he agreed. “Must be the poison from the dog’s mouth. Makes me feel kind of light-headed.”

Ronnie stumbled and Lorraine rose to grab him.…

*   *   *

L
ORRAINE FELL AND
Ronnie Bottoms found themselves sitting in the same sexual position as before. They were once again naked, in the midst of intercourse if not exactly fucking. The only vestige of their battle was the blood oozing down Ronnie’s left forearm from the dog bite and his chest from the dog claws.

They were gazing into one another’s eyes.

When Lorraine rose up and off his erection, they both felt a tearing sensation. Ronnie grunted and Lorraine actually cried out. Instantly weakened by the separation, Ronnie fell over on the table and tumbled to the ground. Lorraine staggered to his side and grasped his wound with both hands.

“What happened to Inglo’s emissary?” UTB-Claude asked, standing over them.