Inside a Silver Box (21 page)

Ronnie’s mind was dulled from the pain and poison, and Lorraine concentrated on the wound, so neither one responded to the Silver Box’s clone.

“Did you kill him again?” the doppelgänger asked.

“How does it feel?” Lorraine asked Ronnie.

“It’s gettin’ a little bettah. How come you had to say that shit about communism?”

“They were just so smug, I wanted to rub their noses in it.”

“If we could’a kept ’em talkin’, we mighta been able to make somethin’ happen. We might’a could’a grabbed one of ’em.”

“I know. I knew what you were trying to do. Next time I’ll let you control the situation.”

“Did you kill him again?” UTB-Claude repeated.

“It wasn’t just one,” Ronnie said. “I mean it was just one mind, but he was in two bodies—a skinny little dude and a dog. When I asked him who he was, he said Nontee.”

UTB-Claude stood up straight, casting his gaze upward but obviously looking into himself. “Nontee. Descended from the tribe of Ga, the progeny of Lambor and Ty. He and his mate Nosta received a quadrant of a minor galaxy where there existed ninety-four intelligent life-forms. The suffering they caused, through me, would put to shame any perversion known, or even imaginable, in your species.”

“You not one of us, Claude?” Ronnie asked with a hint of a smile.

“Sometimes no.”

“We killed him … them,” Ronnie said. “It happened too fast. We were stronger ’cause you put us together, but he wants us bad. You could feel the hate pourin’ off’a him.”

UTB-Claude seemed to be released by the essence of the Silver Box that had dominated him since their return.

“You children did good,” he said. “The Silver Box could tell when Lorraine held on so hard to life and when Ronnie survived the process of rejuvenation that you were both special beings. Go home and lick your wounds. The war will continue tomorrow.”

“Hold up, Claude,” Ronnie said. “I thought you told us that it would take mont’s before he could come at us again.”

“He’s pressing the limits of revitalization,” the doppelgänger replied. “He’s afraid of us.”

“Where were we?” Lorraine asked.

“Here and there,” God’s puppet said with a sly smile on his lips.

THIRTY-FOUR

O
N THE WALK
back, Lorraine held Ronnie’s left hand with her right, reaching over with her left to clutch his wounded forearm. With every step he felt stronger. Quietude enveloped them, and they each felt both together and alone.

“Maybe we should be lovers,” Lorraine suggested at one point, when they were nearing Fifty-ninth Street.

“I don’t feel it like that,” he said. “Do you?”

“No. I guess not. But we’re so, so connected.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s like as if I was your father and you was my mother, right?”

Lorraine smiled in answer.

“Lovers is a choice,” Ronnie continued. “What happened between us is deeper than that. I mean part’a you still hates me, but how’s a mother gonna turn away from her blood?”

“I know,” Lorraine chimed. “It feels like music, right? Like when you hear an old song and it brings you back to the time when you first heard it.”

“Uh-huh. That’s it.”

They walked another block in silence.

“And do you hate me?” Lorraine asked then.

“Yeah, sure I do. When I look at you, I remember that you had everything when I didn’t have nuthin’. I think that white is beautiful and black is just loser-ugly. When you talk, people turn your way, but whatever I try and say, they start movin’ off. I think all’a that stuff and I get mad but then, when I think about it it don’t make sense.”

“But even you just feel it for a minute, why do you stay?”

“Because we touched each other,” Ronnie confessed. “Because nobody ever in the history of the world have reached in and brought somebody else back to life. That’s like the Bible right there, and you know you cain’t argue wit’ what’s holy.”

“It’s true,” Lorraine said, nodding. “I feel just as much holding your hand as I did riding your hard dick,” Lorraine admitted.

“Girl, you got a dirty mouth on you.”

Lorraine laughed and Ronnie felt good to bring her happiness.

*   *   *

“Y
OU CAN LET
me go now,” Ronnie told Lorraine when they were sitting in the window ledge of her upper-floor condo.

“But you aren’t fully healed yet,” she said. “Your arm is still hot inside.”

“Yeah. That’s all right, though. That was part’a their plan.”

“What was?”

“They was either gonna torture you or mark me—they didn’t care which. What they want and what the Silver Box want is the same thing, only each one thinks that they gonna beat the other.”

“You think Nontee can follow your wound?” Lorraine asked.

“He can smell it. But now that you got it almost gone, it’s gonna take him a while to figure out exactly where we are.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because when I touch him, it’s a little like when we get together. I don’t know exactly what he thinkin’ like I do wit’ you but … I get a sense of it.”

Lorraine peered into Ronnie’s eyes and saw something in herself. She was thrown back to when they fought Nontee as Ma Lin and then as the junkman and his dog. Neither time had she actually made bodily contact with the enemy, but … there was a trace of something like a vibration or a scent.

“What does it feel like?” she asked, “when you came in contact with it?”

“It’s like when a mouse dies somewhere in the house,” Ronnie said. “You could smell it, but you don’t know where the stink is comin’ from. But you know you smellin’ it still and all. That’s the way I know that Nontee’ll come after us, but if we’re lucky, it’s gonna take him a while—and if he’s not sure where I am, maybe we could catch him off guard.”

“It’s like your arm is the cheese in a mousetrap,” Lorraine speculated.

“Or a real smart mouse playin’ dead in a mantrap.”

“That’s very dangerous.”

“Somebody got to save the world. You know for damn sure it ain’t gonna save itself.”

Again Lorraine laughed.

*   *   *

L
E GRAND CHAMBRE
was a French café half a floor below street level on East Eighty-first Street. It was a restaurant often patronized by Lorriane’s father, and so, even without a reservation, the maître d’ set up a special booth for the two couples in a usually cordoned-off corner of the dining room.

“How long will the kitchen be open, François?” Lorraine asked their waiter.

“Until your dessert, mademoiselle.”

Ronnie enjoyed the opulence but was slightly distracted by the faraway pain in his forearm and Freya’s thigh pressed up against him on the padded bench.

“How was your day?” Lorraine asked Freya.

“What?” the young teacher’s assistant asked, honestly confused by the rich white girl.

“At work,” Lorraine coaxed.

“Oh … mmm … this one little girl named Seela had head lice, and the other kids were makin’ fun so I took her to the nurse’s office and worked on her hair with a fine metal comb an’ talked to her. It was nice that they let me have the time to do that, ’cause you know a child will remember kindness more than a whippin’.”

“Do you plan to be a teacher one day?” Alton asked even though Lorraine was squeezing his erection under the table.

“When I finish at college,” Freya said. “What about you, Ronnie?”

“What about me?”

“Are you gonna go back to school?”

“I’d’a had to have been there in the first place to go back,” he said. “And you know I only ever learned anything at all in Miss Peters’s second-grade class.”

“That was her kindness,” Freya said with emphasis.

“Yeah,” Ronnie agreed. “She was nice to me and I never forgot it. Sometimes when I was in prison, I’d sit in my cell at night and repeat everything I could remember from her lessons—almost word for word.”

“You were in prison?” Alton Brown asked. He felt odd sitting at that booth with people he hardly knew, having this strange sensual woman slowly massaging his sex.

“Uh-huh. A couple’a times.”

“What for?”

“Armed robbery and assault.”

“Oh.”

Lorraine turned to her date because his penis had gone limp under her hand.

“Don’t worry, brother,” Ronnie assured. “I’m not like that no more. I don’t fight unless I have to, and I don’t need to steal, ’cause I got a minimum wage job and Lore let me stay with her.”

“It’s, it’s just that I never knew anybody who had been to prison,” Alton said. “What was it like?”

“It’s a mothafuckah, man. I mean it’s tough up in there. People gettin’ slashed and raped, robbed and beat up ev’ry day. There’s more drugs than on the street in East New York. And you know you got to get strong in your body an’ your mind if you wanna even hope to survive. It’s like the whole world is evil, like hell. And here you cain’t even blame nobody ’cause you the one got yourself convicted. But that’s all ovah now. You don’t even have to worry about me.”

The quartet talked like that, back and forth, touching each other and sharing pedestrian hopes and dreams with a few nightmares added by Ronnie.

Ronnie almost forgot about the Silver Box and Nontee, Ma Lin and UTB-Claude. The only reason he thought about them at all was the beacon of pain that he was farming in his arm.

Lorraine, however, was thinking primarily about the Silver Box and the world she and her opposite twin had set out to save. Her six circuits around Manhattan had planted the seed of a thought about the nature of the struggle between her mechanical savior and its biological enemy. That same struggle, she felt, was everywhere in existence; it was in the children’s evolving eyes and in the undulating currents beneath the surface of the sentient rivers, it was in the buildings that struggled against gravity and the pull of matter that was unconscious and uneven but still constant the way ocean waves are constant.

Lorraine leaned over to Alton and whispered, “Come on outside with me a minute.”

The couple got up, promising to be back in a few minutes.

When they got out in the night air, Lorraine said, “I need you to come back to my place and talk to me until morning.”

“That’s all?”

“If we fuck, we’ll just fall asleep after,” she said. “I don’t want to fall asleep, because I can’t bother Ronnie. Not tonight.”

“So you just want to sit up all night and talk?”

“Yes.”

“You know when we have sex, it’s not like some physical thing,” he said. “I mean it feels great, but I don’t think it’s just fucking.”

“There’s nothing without being physical,” she said, “without feeling close because of that. I mean, when people say that something is more than physical, it’s like they’re trying to get away from what they are. And what they are is so deep that it hurts. I love taking you in my room. You love it too, but tonight I need to stay awake, so you have to talk to me.”

“But why all night? I mean that does it have something to do with love?”

“It’s more a kind of commitment. Will you do it for me?”

“I guess I could try.”

THIRTY-FIVE

“H
OW DID YOU
meet Ronnie?” Alton Brown asked Lorraine Fell in her bedroom later that night. They were fully dressed except for their shoes, reclining on pillows and bunched-up blankets on her bigger-than-king-size bed.

The sliding glass doors that led to the balcony outside were open, allowing little breezes in that wafted through flimsy curtains and over them now and again.

“He attacked me,” she said. “I guess you could hardly call that a meeting, but it was the first time we were physically aware of each other.”

“He tried to rob you?”

“And rape me and beat me too,” she said in a bland, distracted tone.

She was thinking about how different her perspective on life had become; how she’d learned to tell the truth through telling stories that were near enough to actual events; like UTB-Claude Festerling was close to being a man who’d once lived.

Everything she said about Ronnie was true, but there was so much more. And even though there was more, this was enough to tell the tale.

“And you’re still friends with him?” Alton asked.

“After a while he realized that he was wrong,” she said. “And I came to understand that even though there is no God, that there is.”

“What does that mean?”

“That the history of religion is more like a story between cousins or peoples than it is the study of the master and the slave.”

“Hegel,” Alton said.

“I used to study him, but now I know that not only am I a part of God, I am also equal to God.”

“I’m not even religious, but that still sounds like blasphemy to me.”

Lorraine smiled and kissed the awkward young man’s cheek. “What about you, baby?” she said. “What’s going on in your head?”

The question seemed to throw Alton off. He leaned away from Lorraine.

“What?” she said.

“I don’t know how to say it.”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t Ronnie tell you?”

“He hasn’t said one word about you. Why would he?”

“I don’t know. It just seems like you guys are so close that you’d talk about everything.”

“Everything is a matter of perception.”

“Do you always talk like that?” Alton asked.

“It used to be that this was the way I thought and wrote papers. Somehow I couldn’t talk about what I thought, and therefore I couldn’t really feel how I felt, if you know what I mean.”

“So you feel that I’m not a part of everything?” Alton looked crestfallen.

“Not the everything that Ronnie and I talk about. But here tonight you are definitely in my constellation.”

“You’re a strange woman.”

“I’ll make love to you at sunrise because you called me a woman and not a girl.”

Alton smiled at that, both amused and expectant.

“What didn’t Ronnie tell me?” Lorraine asked, and Alton’s smile flitted away like a carp, she thought, running from a shadow crossing over the surface of its pond.

“I have a longtime girlfriend,” he said.

“What’s her name?”

“Christine.”